Last night while I was dropping off to sleep, for some reason I started thinking of how I used to walk to school when I was little. I must’ve been four when I started walking on my own to school, which was only five minutes away and how nobody thought this was weird, because everybody did this. In a neighbourhood with lots of young families and small children and little car traffic, this was perfectly safe to do. Had we lived in Amsterdam it would’ve been different, but no doubt I and my brothers and sister would’ve been using the public transport before we hit our teens. All of this is of course several decades ago and no doubt parents have become more uptight here as well, but I sincerily doubt we ever see shock horror articles likes this: Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone (found via Unfogged):
Once upon a time in New York City, it wasn’t a big deal if pre-teen kids rode the subways and buses alone. Today, as Lenore Skenazy has discovered, a kid who goes out without a nanny, a helmet and a security detail is a national news story, and his mother is a candidate for child-abuse charges.
A columnist for The New York Sun, Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home. She wrote a column about it and has been amazed at the chord she struck among New Yorkers who remember being kids in those more innocent times.
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Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better – and safer – ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.
“I’m not so much concerned that he’s going to be abducted, but there’s a lot of people who would rough him up,” she said. “There’s some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner.”
In the accompanying poll, 51 percent of the people who responsed said they wouldn’t allow their children on the subway at that age. It all seems a bit hysterical. Even in Amsterdam, vice capital of the Netherlands, I see pre-teen kids ride bikes to school and why shouldn’t they? Part of growing up is learning to do things without your parents and if you keep your kids in an overprotective bubble they will never learn to be independent. Yet judging from the article, keeping their children in such a bubble is exactly what many if not most parents want to do.
A related development is the amount of work and pseudowork children, even young children, seem to be saddled with these days. Children of my generation didn’t get homework until the final year of primary school, if at all and while we did have afterschool activities like learning to play guitar or were involved in sports, few of us had more than one or two of those at the same time. these days it seems schools and parents both are deeply involving even young children with what one Unfogged commenter called “the cultivation of personal individuality and resumé-like individual capacities” all in highly structured, cocooned settings but without giving children much freedom to do things on their own, outside a parent or parent-substitute’s supervision.
So you get a generation of children who are expected to have an agenda filled with “career building”highly structured activities alongside their school work, while everything outside these activities is frowned upon, actively discouraged or even criminalised –asbos for youths hanging around shopping centres, zero tolerance anti drugs policies for toddlers, metal detectors at schools and police officers at the door. Does that combination strike you as raising a generation of people able to dissent from what their leaders and betters have planned for them?