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We Forge Our Chains Out Of Our Fear For Our Children

Jun 20, 2011
By .
Life

Summer!

When I was a kid, summer was a magical time of freedom. I'd lurch out of the house rubbing my eyes with the birdsong at dawn and not return until dinner, filthy and tired and delirious with possibilities fulfilled. My parents would have a basic idea where I was — going to Eric's or Brian's (to start, at least) or to the movies — but they would not know with a GPS-anklet level of specificity. I walked through wild chaparral canyons and hills to friends' houses, rode my bike to the little one-screen movie house and ice cream shop miles away in Montrose, and roamed the horse trails of Flintridge, dodging piles of horse crap and playing militaristic versions of Calvinball with hooting friends. Physical activity that made me whine during the school year (like walking uphill a mile and a half to get home, alone, from first grade on) suddenly was all part of the fun. I might occasionally check in with mom by phone, as a courtesy, but in the days before message machines or call-waiting or cell phones, who could blame me if there were great, sprawling blocks of time when I was untraceable?

Now, of course, I'm a parent of young kids, living just a couple of miles from where I grew up. Would I let them roam the hills I grew up in unsupervised? Would I let them flit from one friend's house to the next, unscheduled, driven by whim and by whose Atari was working that week? Would I let them ride their bikes a mile to the boulevard for a candy bar? Hell no. Because I have caved fully and completely to the relentless message of the media, the government, and the people-who-know-such-things: my children are on constant peril.

I'm dwelling on this sad fact this week because of this maddening story over at Free Range Kids, the excellent site I first mentioned three years ago. Blogger Lenore Skenazy describes how a mother was admonished by police that letting her kids play in the neighborhood the way I used to play — indeed, the way kids have played since before anyone could remember — is illegal:

Dear Free-Range Kids: Our kids have always been “Free -Range.” Unfortunately, today, someone called the police because of the “unsupervised children” running around the neighborhood. My son is six (seven in September), and we allow him to ride his bike to friend’s houses up the street (we live in a small, three-street neighborhood far from any major roads), rollerblade down the road, play with friends in the little patch of woods across the street from our houses, play in sprinklers with the neighbors, etc. There are constantly kids running around our neighborhood, playing with their friends — kids of all ages.

The officer said that kids under ten, by law, are not allowed outside, unsupervised except in their parents’ yard. The officer did not come to our house, but visited the mom of two of my son’s good friends. The people who called reported that all the way back in the winter, a “whole bunch of unsupervised kids were sled riding down the hill” that is across from our townhouse units.

This cop might be all wet about the laws of his state or locality. But the sentiment he expresses — which would have been reviled and regarded as un-American fifty or even thirty years ago — is now mainstream. The media pummels us with stories about children in peril. Politicians snatch low-hanging fruit by demanding more and more and more laws protecting children. Schools and other institutions, rocked by frivolous lawsuits and by the collapse of personal responsibility, ban anything that might lead our little special snowflakes to skin their knees. And so we fear — and we deny our kids the sort of freedoms that we enjoyed.

Our fears are largely spectral — or, at least, vastly exaggerated. We're led to believe that every shrub hides a lurking child molester. Yet all reliable statistics indicate that such crimes against children have steadily declined (not to mention the fact that children have always been at greatest risk for abuse at home, not running around in the wild). Morons driving badly are still a danger, but not more to kids than to adults, and not more now (when they are distracted by texting) than they were back in the day (when they were distract by jamming the 8-Track into the player). Our parents weren't careless, nor were they made of more fearless stuff — they simply weren't bombarded with the daily message of danger, danger, danger. If the Leave It To Beaver/Norman Rockwell vision of America glossed over many ugly truths, at least it did not send the insidious message that little Cindy and Bobby would be kidnapped if they rode to the park and decapitated if they used an off-brand pool toy.

Why should you care? Well, you should care because the danger danger danger drumbeat and our capitulation to it is part of the process of making us more dependent upon the government, more subservient to authority, more willing to let the state use kids as an excuse to tell us what do to in an increasingly wide and unprincipled array of circumstances. Accepting that kids' lives must be heavily structured normalizes the idea that all of our lives must be structures. And it's self-sustaining. We crank and rant about youth being the slackoisie, but can you really blame them? Kids raised in the whiffle life are taught dependence and fear, not self-reliance and self-assurance. Do you think those kids are going to grow up and vote for more personal freedom and liberty when you're an old crank? Or are they going to look to the Nanny State, lovingly embodied by their own dear parents, to tell everyone what to do, just as it has always told them? Can you expect them to respect your desire to wander where and how you please, when they've always been taught they mustn't do that because it's dangerous? Sure. Good luck with that.

Now excuse me — my kid has a scheduled playdate.

Edit: Forgot to note that the Free Range Kids story was courtesy of Walter Olson.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

7 Comments
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7 Comments

  1. TJIC  •  Jun 20, 2011 @12:16 pm

    One of the many reasons that cops enrage me is that they claim all sorts of things about the law that just aren't true.

    As an adult, I had a cop in town tell me to ride my bicycle on the sidewalk.

    I told her that I could not, because it was illegal under the Mass General Laws for me to do so.

    She said that I was wrong.

    I told her to look up MGL 89 for herself.

    She then relented and asked that I ride on the sidewalk "as a favor to her".

    I told her that my insurance would look poorly on any accident that happened in that case, and further, I was unwilling to break a traffic law "even as a favor for a police officer who ASKED ME TO BREAK THE LAW".

    She got confused and upset and wandered away at that point.

  2. TJIC  •  Jun 20, 2011 @12:17 pm

    Footnote: it is illegal to ride on sidewalks in MA only in "central business districts" – I believe that it may be legal elsewhere.

    …but it's still unsafe for a cyclist to be doing ~20 mph on sidewalks.

  3. Grandy  •  Jun 20, 2011 @12:27 pm

    Surely this has also contributed to the rise in childhood obesity. I just googled mapped the frequent route I took, in summer time, to bike to a friend's house for frequent football, basketball, and other outdoor activies (and yes, also indoor activities like playing Wizardry and Ultima IV).

    3.6 miles. Now, that was almost always one way; mom drove a bitching Oldsmobile station wagon back then and if I didn't spend the night that nignt, she'd pick me up on the way home.

    I biked down some busy roads (with sidewalks, fortunately, but I still had to cross at a significantly traffic intersection). I frequently biked in monsoon conditions. I once had my bike fall a part on me halfway there, in a World Ending Rain, and walked the rest of the way with bike pieces in tow ("Where the hell have you been?" "see how my bike is in 4 pieces there? Fuck off you observationally challenged dumbass") (true story).

    Oh, I played sports and stuff almost year round. That was moreso relevant, from a fitness standpoint, in highschool (oh, the running around and such matter. But in highschool you get the added bonuses of sigificant conditioning). But this was my summers all the way up to the start of 10th grade (we moved that October, closer to that fiend's house, and then everybody was driving).

    This wasn't exactly a choice on my part. I was not alound to sit around all day. In the summer if I wasn't doing this I was biking roughly that same distance (sometimes shorter) to go swimming.

    Before that point? Me and fiends on the block were running around doing things, including playing sports but also include biking places/exploring and stuff like that. Outside play was a regular fixture. When we moved in 1983 my immediate "limit" was our smallish but sizeable for play purposes neighborhood (a small U shaped road off of a larger road). I wouldn't go so far as to say there was a trival/communal thing going on there. . . but there was some common sense at work. The mothers who were at-home didn't exactly keep a watchful eye on us but still generally knew what we were up to, as a group. It was understood that if an adult needed to step in on something they could and would and everbody was satisfied with that. We had a nice house and a nice yard then, but you know that alone wouldn't have been enough for outside play.

    We had the best basketball court on the block (biggest play area + newest goal, once it went up). Next door, was the best yard for Soccer/Football (they had a smaller backyard but were on the "corner of the U". There was a slope, sure, but it wasn't too bad and still was a great playing area). Down the street was the best fort building back yard. These things were the allowed realm of the kids on the street. Nobody batted an eye about it (oh, there was a cranky neighbor or two who did not like people in their yard. Par for the course and these yards were easily avoided).

    Many familes live in homes that lack the yardspace of my families then-home, I will wager. And again, that yard alone isn't enough for proper play, even with friends. Cooped up in yards with inadequate facilities, what happens? Kids aren't really out from under their parent's legs, so the inferior (to our childhood) outside time isn't enforced properly (the kids are probably less noticeable/in the way when inside watching TV/playing video games/building evil robots). It's wrong to blame TV for this, even though a rise in viewed television has been linked to the obesity issue. We never should have retreated from our neighborhoods, nor allowed others to make us fear them.

  4. Wilhelm Arcturus  •  Jun 20, 2011 @12:55 pm

    My own childhood was similarly unconstrained, though I will point out there seemed to be a general maternal treaty allowing anybody's mom to kick your ass (in the "Leave it to Beaver" level "dad hollered at me" context) and send you back to your own home if you were seriously out of hand. (Something that seemed to spike with the proximity of the Fourth of July.)

    But the brainwashing has worked. My wife and I live in a neighborhood that is mostly people the age of our parents, which we use as an excuse for not just shoving our child out the front door and saying, "Go play!" The litmus test for me came when we watched an old episode of "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" that popped up on TV. There is nobody kinder and more good of heart than Fred Rogers. I know of nothing that contradicts this.

    But my wife and I were practically horrified watching this show which we so loved as children. It seems that every pedophile stereotype in the last 30 years has started with Mr. Rogers as the source. We pretty much said to each other, while scolding ourselves at the same time for such narrow thinking, that not only would we never leave our child alone with somebody who behaved like Mr. Rogers, but that we couldn't even endorse watching the show, lest our child misconstrue the probably bogus signs of a pedophile.

    Mr. Rogers went from happy memory to red-flag warning.

    I'm brainwashed. I know it. Yet I cannot act against it.

  5. Don  •  Jun 20, 2011 @1:29 pm

    I generally agree. Rather than a general rule, I think any parent ought to be ready with the answer to the question "Can this particular child handle this particular situation without screwing up dangerously?" If not, the environment is probably either too restrictive, or too lax.

  6. Scott Jacobs  •  Jun 21, 2011 @2:20 am

    I had similarly few limits of my life when I was younger.

    However, in a scene that would lay the ground work for my life, I was usually upstairs in my room reading.

    At one point, my parents searched the neighborhood for me for over an hour, only to return home, walk upstairs, and see me laying on my bed one of the 3 or 4 books I gotten from the book mobile…

  7. Matt  •  Jun 23, 2011 @11:22 am

    By the standards of people we knew then, my childhood was extremely restricted. And yet I generally had the liberty of the neighborhood (a big complex of rented "townhouses" occupied mostly by grad students and other middle-class transients…my mother and I lived there 15 years, which set a tenant longevity record I doubt has been beaten since). Not a whole lot of kids, and I didn't "play" much, but I did a lot of walking.

    Honestly, even in my current neighborhood, the default policy of other families seems to come down to "be home by dark, don't cross either of the major streets on the border by yourself, and don't loiter in the middle of the road, but you can go down to the park or the creek or to another person's house/yard, or wherever else you can get to without crossing one of those two high-traffic streets". Seems sensible enough. I'd probably let my own kids cross one of those major streets, when they're old enough and if they do it at the crossing light…but I can understand why some other people might be reluctant about that.

    What I can't understand is why any child past toddler-hood and not suffering from some sort of severe disability would be effectively unable/forbidden to cross his parents' property line except in the backseat of a car.

    The whole concept of organized "play dates" bewilders me. The word "play" should not be applied to any "organized" activity except a sports league. And until/unless blood is drawn, parents should not be involved in "play" except as participants.

    Your child is FAR more likely to be killed in a car crash while you're driving them around than he is to be kidnapped off the street by a stranger. It could be argued (by the sort of moralistic scold who would try to shame parents out of perfectly reasonable practices) that the present standard Ken claims to follow even constitutes "child endangerment" on that basis.