amblypygid ([info]amblypygid) wrote,
@ 2008-02-13 16:06:00
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Danger
I keep reading news stories where parents are criticized for leaving children alone at home, or letting them wander around the mall without an adult, or play in the neighborhood without parental supervision. And I'm confused about what I perceive to be big changes in this since my childhood.

I remember starting to play out in the neighborhood alone around age six. Staying home alone around age nine. Going to the mall with friends at age ten or eleven. Babysitting other kids at age eleven or twelve. But so many parents seem reluctant to let their kids out alone at all. I've talked to people who won't let their ten year olds walk to school.

I know people are afraid of kidnappers and child molesters and goodness knows what else. But the risk of these things seems very low to me. All the statistics I've read seem to indicate that the rate of this sort of crime is actually lower than when I was a kid. And there seems to be another kind of risk in never letting children out of your sight. How will they become independent and self-confident without the opportunity to practice doing things on their own?

K will be five this week. We let her go out alone to deliver birthday invitations by herself to the neighborhood kids. I did watch when she was going out and coming back to see she crossed the one (not busy) street safely, and looked out the window a couple times to check on her (most of the houses were within sight of our own). We had a talk before she left about how to handle any situations that came up. She came back proud and happy.

Now, K is pretty mature for her age. M is 4 1/2, and he's definitely not ready to go out by himself yet. But it won't be too long before he's ready too. I'm wondering how to balance my views of this with what appear to be different expectations these days. I remember that the police were called because a ten year old was at the Mall of America alone, and I was thinking, what trouble is he going to get into at the mall at age ten? I would let my kids go to the mall at that age.

So. What do people think is reasonable? When are kids ready to do things alone?

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[info]wiredferret
2008-02-13 10:46 pm UTC (link)
For the record, I'm pretty sure that the MoA has an unescorted minors policy, in the first place.

I grew up in mostly rural areas, but I had a relatively scare-free childhood. Recently, I retraced the bikepath that I took to school when I was in 1st grade. It's about a mile and a half long, and crosses two Snelling-size streets. My mom now tells me that it scared her to have me do it alone, but they didn't have a real option.

I was almost 5 by the time we got back to the states, so I had to learn traffic rules and all that a bit later than most kids. But by the time I was 10-12, I was going on 20-mile bike rides by myself, out in the country. I had to tell them which roads I was planning to take, and about how long I expected to be gone. If cell phones had been available, they probably would have had me take one, more for flat tires than anything else.

I think my kids will probably get locked-down cell phones relatively early. That way I can give them more latitude with less worry. I am not worried about kidnapping or that sort of thing, I'm worried about "I was playing on the back forty and fell off the rope swing and my bone is sticking out of my leg". I know my parents wished that we had them when they sent us off at 16 to the city, an unknown destination, and unknown return time. I wished I could easily call and extend curfew if the game I was reporting on went into triple-overtime. I think the cell phone will become the virtual buddy, and it can run for help most of the time, even if you're alone.

We let Baz and Kay play alone in the fenced-in yard behind our apartment. Sometimes other kids play, too. We keep the window open so we can hear any screaming. Other mommies think we are a bit weird for letting little kids do this, but when else will they learn?

I think my danger ranking is much like my parents, from least to most:
neighborhood
country, safe activity
city streets
high-traffic indoors
country, risky activity

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[info]amblypygid
2008-02-13 10:58 pm UTC (link)
My understanding is that the MoA has a policy that prohibits kids under age 16 from being there alone on Friday or Saturday nights. I don't think there's a policy at other times.

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[info]mousezilla
2008-02-14 12:26 pm UTC (link)
I just checked the MoA website. It doesn't say anything about unescorted kids other than the weekend evening under 16 rule.

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[info]harmonyangel
2008-02-13 10:49 pm UTC (link)
Here via [info]resolute, just offering my own personal history and two cents.

I... have no idea what is actually normal for kids these days. I'm 21 years old, and my parents were always super-protective of me. I'm not sure I was able to stay home alone until I was around 11 or 12, and even then it was only for the half hour or so between my school bus arriving and my mom coming home from work. At other people's houses, a parent had to be present when I went over there until I reached high school age. I have a brother who is two and a half years younger than me, and he and I weren't even allowed to stay in our own house alone overnight until we were 17 and 15 (when I had a car). I wasn't allowed to walk alone farther than the few houses on either side of mine until I was in high school, and I don't think I was allowed to go to the mall or the movies alone with friends until mid-late middle school (I specifically remember being excited, at 12, when I was going to go to the movies with a friend alone for the first time, and I thought I was being sneaky and subversive by seeing a PG-13 movie).

Now, my parents had some reason to worry - there had been kidnapping/murder cases in the surrounding area every other year or so throughout my childhood, and our house was broken into when I was in 2nd grade. My mom never let me walk to school, despite the fact that she had done so as a child (she grew up in the same house I grew up in), because times had changed so much. My neighborhood has no sidewalks and cars constantly whiz by at 40 mph despite the residential speed limit, so it made sense for her to worry even about me crossing the street. And while I do think my parents were always a bit too overprotective, and that their overprotectiveness probably hindered my ability to be truly self-sufficient (which, to be honest, I'm still not), at the same time... I think they had some reason to be. I remember starting a bonfire in the woods at around age 13, out with friends where my parents would never have let me go, and that could have been extremely dangerous. The same with the clay pits in my town, which had notoriously dangerous areas, and which my parents screamed at me about when they found out I'd visited them while I was over a friend's house in 5th grade. And I was a good kid - I never, ever violated my parents' rules unless my friends pressured me into it, and even then I usually stood my ground. So if I was doing those kinds of things, I can't imagine what the rest of my peers were doing.

But if you really trust your kids, and you know your area well enough to know that they'll be safe walking around, well - you're the only one who can truly judge that.

Edited at 2008-02-13 10:51 pm UTC

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[info]buccaneer
2008-02-13 10:51 pm UTC (link)
There was a This American Life recently about precisely this- the geography of childhood.

I don't have an opinion as to age of kids- it seems you have a healthy balance of safety-to- building independent children, though.

It also seems to me we're raising a generation of shut-ins. How will they value the great outdoors when all they ever see is the Disney Channel or Discovery & National Geo? It's not enough. It doesn't become real, the outdoors, unless you're in them. The cotton-batting that some parents wrap their kids in, and the constant recourse to the law vs. personal responsibility seems excessive to me. But then, I cracked my skull, cut myself, burnt, froze and bruised all over the place with stuff that was considered safe for kids- if used properly. It gave me a healthy respect for doing things carefully. It sucked, but it was a thorough education. I still have a childhood scar or two (and a number of ones that I got as a grown-up, as well, some people never learn some things). There were as you say, really bad people back there in the past, and they did horrible things to kids, but they weren't given the entire outdoors as a reaction- they were hunted and arrested, and people used the public places because they were theirs, and not the criminals' domain. We are such a fearful society- terrorism, sexual offenders, both small populations of people, that we've lost all sense of proporton, giving them much more power than they deserve. We've changed our society to something that I can't even compare to my own society when I was young- I have far more in common with Richard Jeffries' Bevis and Kipling's Stalky & Co. of 80 years before my birth than I have to today's children of 40 years after... SO many differences. Even the kids that spent an "inordinant" amount of time inside spent more time outside than they do.

I made the outside my own Sherwood forest, Mirkwood, and especially magical places not found in books but from within my own head- I still think of one stretch of shoreline as The Wide Bay's beach, where the forest-people and the ocean-families trade. Who knows? Someday I might even be able to wallop all those imagined peoples and places into a story. I somehow don't see the same sort of moon-harvest with the CRT-kids.

But then, we didn't have the wealth of techno-toys they do to keep them indoors. But I have to wonder how they'd manage if the power went out. Our parents worried about brand-name toys. They hadn't seen *anything* yet. I worry about brand-name imaginations; that kids will think within narrowly defined Star Wars Action Toy universes, and that unless it's a movie or a video game, it won't interest them. watching children reading a paper book rather than an e-reader even feels like a triumph- no power, portable, always there, no subscription...and when it's dead, unlike the e-reader, rotting for a thousand years in a land-fill, it just breaks down into organic dust.

I used to get yelled at for reading too much. Now I fear the kids are reading too little, and not being inspired to literary devilment out in the woods.

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[info]talkswithwind
2008-02-13 11:52 pm UTC (link)
Our parents worried about brand-name toys. They hadn't seen *anything* yet. I worry about brand-name imaginations; that kids will think within narrowly defined Star Wars Action Toy universes, and that unless it's a movie or a video game, it won't interest them.

I have a nephew just like that. It wasn't until he got to, oh, 10 or 11 or so that he got into books in any significant way. Before then all of his imaginative play was derivatives of stuff on TV at the time. Like so many of his peers he could rattle off the names and powers of over 50 Pokemon without slowing down, much like I used to be able to do with Transformers. He followed that mainstream anime TV trend to the T. I didn't know those universes well enough to see what was pure derivative, and what was creative riffing on the themes presented in those shows.

Nowadays he is a big reader. I don't know what his imaginative play looks like, but his voice just changed so chances are pretty good I don't really /want/ to know. *ahem*.

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[info]lynnal
2008-02-13 11:05 pm UTC (link)
I walked to school by myself when I started kindergarden. Most kindergardeners had parents walking with them the first day, but after that did it alone. It was all of four blocks to school, and there were lots of big kids walking in the same direction. This was in south Minneapolis, near Wenonah elementary. No major streets between my house and school.

I was certainly allowed to play in the back yard with minimal supervision at five or earlier. I was allowed to walk up to the school playground with friends and pretty much walk around the neighborhood. I walked two miles to my grandparent's house when I was nine, but I certainly was NOT allowed to do that. I remember going skating at the park, but not by myself. I didn't learn to ride a bike until junior high, so I stayed in walking distance of home most of the time.

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[info]quicknow
2008-02-13 11:31 pm UTC (link)
Growing up I was allowed to play in the neighborhood without an adult supervisor from around age 5 as long as there were other & older kids around and I didn't leave the predefined boundaries. (I know this because I broke my nose for the first time when riding my bike back home at age 6.)

My parents believed that, as long as we had a destination inside the boundaries, could easily be found, and came home on time, it wasn't a problem. (this is the basic curfew we had to: parents had to know who we were with, where we were going, and when we'd be home)

I started babysitting my two younger siblings at home (for short periods) at age 10 (as soon as my brother turned 1). ETA: And once my youngest sibling turned 18 months(and went to daycare), I babysat my sister from the time the bus let us off until a parent came home a few days a week. And I started babysitting other people's children at age 12.

At age 11 I would ride my bike to mall, to the pharmacist, church activities, and was responsible for biking to my piano lessons once a week (which was around 2 miles away and across a major street).

I always knew exactly how far the bounds of my freedom went (for example: to the mall to go to the pharmacy to pick up my script - yes, to the mall to watch a movie without having permission - no) and was punished for going outside of bounds.

I have a few more scars and healed broken bones because of how much I was allowed to wander but the only lasting side-effects were positive ones.

Edited at 2008-02-13 11:36 pm UTC

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[info]handyhunter
2008-02-13 11:35 pm UTC (link)
Here via [info]resolute.

In the Philippines, we were never allowed to go anywhere unsupervised. "We" meaning siblings and cousins; I don't think I know anyone there who isn't a relation or a very, very close family friend. There was no playing in the neighbourhood or going over to someone else's house unless you had a driver to take you there and back, and possibly also a nursemaid, as well as permission from all the adults involved. I think around 8-ish is maybe when you get to outgrow your nursemaid, though my family had already moved to Canada by then and we didn't have them here.

It's only in the older teenage years/more recent times that it seems like the older generation (parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles) are allowing their kids to go off to malls and other places on their own. There is a reason for this hyper vigilance - kidnappings (this happened to two of my cousins; they're fine now), getting lost, getting mugged - that is maybe not such a concern in North America, at least not the parts I've lived in.

I was 5 when we moved to BC, and from then on, things weren't nearly as restrictive. We first lived in a very quiet neighbourhood (we lived in a cul de sac and I think there were maybe three cars that drove through it) and there were some other kids around my age, so we'd all end up playing together. We also walked to and from school together, some of us, mostly under the supervision of my 11 or 12 year old cousin. My parents also dropped me off at the barn for hours on end, after I started riding (when I was 5-going-6). A lot of the kids there were older than I was (young teenagers), but they were good kids and everyone tended to look out for each other. I'm not sure a barn is safer than a mall, but it was a lot more fun for me.

I don't remember when we started learning how to bus (which bus to get on, which stops to take, how much money you had to have), but I think it was also pretty early on. Not that I ever went anywhere, really, because I much preferred reading to going out, unless it was to the barn and then I'd usually get dropped off because there weren't any bus stops nearby and was a little too far to walk. My little sister is 11 and she knows how to take the bus by herself already - I think the rest of us was older than that. She also knows how to cook and is quite responsible for stuff like house keys and how much money she has. She also carries a cell phone, which we older kids never had until high school. I don't know if that makes a difference.

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[info]talkswithwind
2008-02-13 11:42 pm UTC (link)
Kindergarten and 1st grade was at a school 2.25 blocks from our house. My parents picked that house for exactly that reason. I got escorts to school the first few days until everyone was confident I knew the way. Then, it was by my self. Even in the depths of winter, it built character. It got better when I found neighborhood kids and we could walk to school in a clump.

As for unattended play, we were similar to Wiredferret. We were allowed in the front or back yards where window-supervision was possible, but play further from that needed permissions.

I don't remember when we got bikes and were allowed the free run of a several block rectangle bounded by the busy streets. It got us running around and exercising the all important yayas.

From 2nd grade through to 8th, our school regularly had fundraisers that had us kids going from door to door on our street. The first time I did it I had dad behind me the whole way. Then he didn't need to come. Then I was allowed to bother neighbors not on our street, and even several blocks away. My sister generally got liberties earlier as I had reassured my parents that it could be done safely.

These days? The culture of fear is much greater; I can tell, and I'm not even a parent. When Res first described her problem my first impression as to why was, "Ah, that's so they don't fall into Bad Influences." It seems to me that the Conventional Wisdom has come round to the opinion that childrens environment needs to be tightly controlled, otherwise the children will grow up to be malcontents. It also says that parents need to do the controlling, licensed teachers are a valid proxy, which neatly precludes unsupervised activities. The younger the child, the more vulnerable to wayward influences.

Which is a long way of saying that wandering the neighborhood at age 8-9 with 2-8 of our closest (in terms of proximity) friends is greatly frowned upon these days. Young children NEED to be visibly supervised, and if that supervision is a cell-phone on a lanyard around their neck, then so be it.

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[info]lilacsigil
2008-02-14 12:06 am UTC (link)
I lived in a large rural town of about 23,000 people. I could play in the quiet street and park unsupervised at age 4. I was allowed to walk myself to school (about 1km, across several not-very-busy roads) at age 5 and was allowed to ride my bike around to friend's home (or around with friends) at age 8, as soon as I got a bike! I could babysit my brothers during the day from the same age (they were 6 and 2 at the time) and in the evening a few years later. Also, I was a slightly chubby kid and my mother was obsessed with making me thin, so she would make me leave the house and go on errands (sometimes riding 4-5 kilometres) as often as she could. At age 12 I was allowed to take the train to Melbourne (about 2.5 hours) by myself, and use public transport alone to go and visit my grandmother. I was a pretty responsible and organised kid - my brothers weren't allowed to go places by themselves until a little bit later, or with me supervising them (one brother is rather vague, one brother is rather spontaneous in his planning...)

My nephews live in Melbourne (about 4 million people) and I cannot imagine my 4-year-old nephew being allowed to walk himself to school. In the tiny rural town where I live now, the youngest kids out on their own in public seem to be about 7, but they also have great big farms to run around on, and mostly can't get into town without someone to drive them. Honestly, I'd rather let a kid walk around town or to the neighbours' homes than leave them alone in a mall all day as a lot of people seem to do in the city.

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[info]techdragon
2008-02-14 04:09 am UTC (link)
Since moving here, the boys have been allowed to play outside unsupervised... they were (at the time 5 & 7). The rule is, though, that they both have to be outside together. I figure it is safer that way. Two kids are less likely to get snatched and together they are much louder when they play - I only start to get worried if I can't hear them. Also, one is always ready to tattle on the other.

Outside of that, I do worry... I know that I am not following in my parent's footsteps. Heck, as a small child, I biked everywhere without who know and any sense... but I did have a scare or two (that I never told my parents) and I usually had my cousin with me (again with the pair of kids - I was rarely all alone).

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[info]badgerbag
2008-02-14 04:34 am UTC (link)
I definitely notice cultural and class divides in this. My neighborhood is mixed white/latino and the white people don't let their kids out. The latinos do.

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[info]laffingbuddha
2008-02-14 02:20 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure there is an "age" that is appropriate but more the maturity of the child. As you say, K is mature for her age and is confident to explore her world in a good way. You were supervising in a way in keeping an eye on her.

I was obligated to ride the bus to elementery school because there was an often used railroad tack between home and the school. As the crow flew it was only a few blocks away but school policy was we HAD to bus because of safety. After elementery school we walked, which was about a mile down the road on a busy street. We even rode bicycles some days, but long before this I was riding my bike to friends' houses just as soon as I could ride. I only remember playing outside alone or with friends. It is my opinion that we are actually safer than people think. I think the media exacerbates this. As Buccaneer states about a shut-in generation I think kids are over protected and the development of autonomy and personal responsibilty is stunted with such tight control.

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[info]mousezilla
2008-02-15 01:17 pm UTC (link)
I agree with LB, age is a bit less important than maturity. But, unfortunately, other people aren't going to see a child's maturity, they're only going to see the kid's age, and a parent who isn't raising their sprog in keeping with modern paranoia. The best you can do is judge your own kiddos readiness, and try to balance that with the culture of "Child-molesters-and-drug-pushers-round-every-corner-ONOEZ!!1one!"

I the case of that 10 year old, though, I would have called the cops myself. He'd been there for 7 hours, his mom was already 2.5 hours late to pick him up, he had no money, and no way to reach her while she played at the casino.
I think 10 is a reasonable age for kids to roam a mall, provided they're with a group of friends, they have a cell phone, and/or the parent is in the same mall.

From the age of 8 and 5, my little sister and I were pretty much given the run of our small town. There were a few verboten places, like the Mississippi that ran a few blocks away, because the river in that area is a dangerous place to swim, both for the currents and the crap the local refineries and plants had been leaking. We had the standard "Where, who, when" arrangement, with the "look out for your baby sister addendum." We had to get special permission to go to A&W or the gas station, due to the highway between us and them. Mom would call us home using the RenFaire hawker bellow that carried for blocks. It was of particular amusement to her when the neighborhood moms started relaying her call. It got so no matter where we were, we couldn't say we hadn't heard her.
I think we were given so much lassitude for a few reasons, one being was the police station within eyeshot of the front yard, staffed with a lot of kid-loving local cops. Nobody stayed missing long with those guys around.

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