I heard a woman on the radio yesterday I believe her name is Lenore Skanzy. She is the author of a book called Free Range Children. Recently she has been promoting today Saturday May 22 as the first annual national take your kids to the park and leave them there day. She was talking about children as young as 7-8 years old and leaving them alone for time commensurate with their ages.
People today are utterly terrified of what can happen to there children. When I told my wife about the radio show she asked if this was just a ploy to lure in all the perverts. My thought is that I'm not sure if a national ditch your kids day is good, but I know living in fear is bad.
I wonder if the increase in both parents working hasn't helped exasperate these fears. Years ago when I was young most of the moms didn't work and kids were everywhere. We can't go back and I don't know that it would fix anything, but we do need to find a way to not live in fear. The fear we have we share with our kids so be smart and let them grow strong and fearless.
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Yeah, this idea doesn't work quite the same as a national smoke out day. As Lynne said, announcing in advance that kids will be left unattended might give bad ideas to bad people. I do think we as a society have become overly protective. When I consider the freedom we had compared to how shelter my kids were at similar ages the difference is stark. I think some of the changed mindset is traceable to two main things. First is more constant national news coverage. Bad people have always been with us and bad things have always happened. However, news coverage has changed. If a child (not named Lindbergh) was kidnapped you didn't hear about it unless it happened in your town. Second factor is human nature leads us to believe we can remove all danger from life.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I think she has an interesting idea, but fails at the execution.
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is complicated, and easy solutions don't work. I think to figure out what's wrong we can't just say "too much news coverage" or "moms are no longer staying at home" but have to look deeply into some of the core assumptions and values we've got going. I agree that both of those things-- the news, two parents working-- contribute, but that there are layers and layers here, it's all bound up together.
We live in neighborhoods that are no longer communities, parents step outside their houses even less than their kids, we have those whole "culture of anonymity" thing going, we've got powerful lobbies marketing to the basest parts of our natures (sex, hate, fear, etc). How do we untangle all that? How do we create communities? Allow people to be accountable to each other? Slow down, step away from the nonsense?
I'd like my son to have some of what I had growing up... I was able to ride my bike until it was dark out, I could go to a friend's house a mile or two down the road and all I had to do was let me mom know I was going, I could play in the back yard or in the woods for hours at a time. There was little or no fear. Everybody in town knew my name, whose kid I was, everybody had an eye out for me.
On the other hand, I don't want him to have a lot of what came with that. That same small town had a whole lot of racism, a whole lot of sexism, a whole lot of chest-thumping god-country-and-mud-drags beer soaked masculinity, a lot of poverty, and so on.
I won't say there wasn't racism when I was growing up.Probably sexism as well but both were unobtrusive at least to me as a kid. To what extent they both still exist is debatable and what effect they have on raising children. I would say both are dwindling but so are God and Country at least there prominence in our daily lives. This is a problem for people do need positives to rally around to form the type of community that everyone knows their names.
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