22 Comments on Boy, 10, reportedly left behind at airport so parents can make their flight

  3. One time when my in laws were taking all their 9 kids to Kentucky (my father-in-law drove a huge older International Travel All to transport his 9 kids) to visit their grandparents and had stopped to get gas and drove off without counting all the kids to make sure no one was missing. Sure, enough they forgot one of my wife’s younger brothers when he went to the bathroom and didn’t come back in time. About an hr. later the kids noticed that he was missing, and they had to turn back to get him just waiting patiently for them to come back and pick hIm up. After that mandatory head counts were made after every stop.

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  7. My grandfather quit school at age 10 and went to work. My mother walked 20 blocks in NYC to school starting at age 5. My father got an after-school job as a delivery boy in the Bronx at age 12. Many kids biked for miles delivering newspapers at age 11. My brother and I rode our horses alone on 30-mile all-day trips when we were 11 and 12. And by ages 8 or 9 were completely gone from home doing stuff from morning until suppertime. My sister had babysitting jobs by the time she was 10. When my twins were 9, I started sending them off on planes alone in the summertime to visit cousins thousands of miles away. (And they also were biking for miles and doing errands for me by age 10. Also periodically getting arrested by cops who didn’t know they were homeschooled.)

    All without having, unlike most kids these days, cell phones.

    We seriously are stunting children. It’s getting ridiculous. I think it started with those stupid milk cartons in the 90s of abducted children who 99% were “abducted” by their noncustodial parents.

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  8. Off topic, but I have to brag about my 10 year old grandson. Brad will like this story. He decided this year he wanted to race, so his Dad called the guy who owns the sanction and asked if he could race as the rules state 14. He said he could, but it would be up to each track’s discretion.

    So a friend of the family’s gave him a car, it’s just a FWD 4 cylinder class, a beginner class, but he’s racing with adults in their 20’s up to 60’s. The old car he was driving didn’t have the same type of motor that the others had, so PaPa with a little encouragement bought him a car with the same kind of motor.

    First night in it, it overheated, then the second night it got hot again. Discovered it had a blown head gasket. His Dad and friends changed it and tonight was his first night in it running right. He came to life tonight after a tough heat race when some dude dumped him. At least he did come and apologize to him afterwards and because my grandson is being raised right told him, “that’s okay it’s racing.” Another entire story on what the kid has had to put up with out of grown ass men.
    I couldn’t be more proud of this kid, who all season so far has shown more maturity than grown ass men and hasn’t let it get to him. His Dad kept telling him to just hold his line and make good clean laps and the speed would come and he got to see that tonight.

    So he’s never been left, but quite the accomplishment in my eyes for a 10 year old.

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  11. Old Racist White Woman

    Nice story. I bet he does well and has a passion for life now. He already has pit crew and financial backing to boot !

    What kind of race? I’m imagining a dirt track is involved. He just became the cool kid in school, if he wasn’t already.

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  13. janitor – You are so right!

    At four years old, my mother would give me money to walk to the neighborhood store and buy bread and milk. The man behind the counter thought nothing of it. I also walked alone to Kindergarten. At 11, I used to ride all over town (for miles) and my parents had no idea I was doing it or that I was even gone. At 12, I was allowed to hike/fish for a week in the high mountains with a schoolmate after taking a bus ride to the pass. And all of these accounts pale in comparison to how my Michigan grand father grew up!

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  15. When I was 5 years old back in 1958, I was allowed to walk by myself to kindergarten thru Cannon Hill Park on Spokane’s S hill after my mom showed me the way from our house about a half mile or so from our house. It was always a blast when walking by Cannon Hill Pond especially in the spring to stop and catch pollywogs and bring them home with me, my mom was OK with that. The house where I attended kindergarten turned out later to be the house that my wife later grew up in. I walked everywhere when I was a small kid to school, to Cub Scout meetings after dark in a house a few blocks away and even the old public library (a Carnegie library) just down the hill about a mile away from our house on the lower S. hill by myself. I am thankful that my parents trusted me to be a free-range kid as it helped me to build self-confidence at a young age. Later in my early teens I had an early morning paper route where I delivered the Spokesman Review newspaper in the upper Manito neighborhood. And I used to walk all the way downtown a couple of miles or so to buy comic books at a local store. Talking to my son last night about this, he said he wouldn’t allow his kids to do this nowadays since the times have changed so much. And he lives about a half block away from a city park and he won’t allow his kids to go over there unsupervised just because. Believe me, we had it better back than when we were allowed to be free and were trusted to do the right thing.

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  16. geoff – Same here. Walking to and from school, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, lawn mowing, snow shoveling – even the neighbors side walk (which I still do today). Snow forts, sledding, snowball fights, buckeye fights, baseball, football, played Army, making and flying balsa airplanes, etc, Back then neighborhoods were true communities of people who knew each other and watched out for each other. You could go out when the homework was done and come home when the lights came on. Kids were never at any risk.

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  19. Anymouse:

    There’s a reason journalism has a saw about “Man Bites Dog”. Stuff makes the news because it’s an anomaly.

    The story is weird (guy shoots himself), it’s about “teens” who apparently easily ran away and themselves reported about a strangely-behaving man, and it turns our focus to something out of the ordinary, rather than the many millions of teens who have uneventful days and lives.

    One of the biggest changes that we have now is the internet, rather than the local morning paper that might have reported this in one community in a few paragraphs that wouldn’t have been picked up elsewhere even if it made it to the AP wire.

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  20. The question isn’t whether a 10 year old should be left in a public place, awaiting a ride home from a family member. (My brother could have handled that and anyone who tried anything funny; I would have crumpled in a ball of tears on the floor the moment my mother suggest it. Also, as many have noted: that was then, now is different.)

    The real question is what kind of parents proceed with a vacation with their younger child when their 10 year old is stopped at the gate?! That kid is gonna have ISSUES. Talk about feeling like your younger sibling is the favorite… Wow.

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  21. We used to have to go to school uphill! Both ways! With pots and pans on our legs because we couldn’t afford feet! It was always in a terrible snowstorm because no one could afford good weather! Then we had to rebuild the school every day with ice held together with snow for mortar! And we had to think about food for lunch because there was never anything to eat! We couldn’t sleep because dreams cost too much!

    And we were grateful for what we had!

  22. Dadof4, you would be correct, dirt track. I guess none of us should have been surprised, he was raised traveling form one track to the next. At a year old he was already driving around a battery powered car, and he would only drive it in circles. His Mom is a softball girl so she wanted him to play baseball when he was 5, he spent the majority of his time drawing dirt tracks in the dirt.

    I honestly hoped when he got into basketball that he wasn’t going to want to race, didn’t know if my heart could take it. First time in a race though and I witnessed how well he was driving and saw him see a wreck in front of him on turn 1 before he was through turn 4, I looked at my husband and said welp I guess I might as well get used to it, it’s obviously in his blood, not many racers anymore who know you look past the nose of your car.

    It’s not ideal that he has to race against adults, but he’s more mature than 90% of them are.

    His Dad isn’t getting to race that much this year, but he’s one proud Dad of his kid.

    My daughter got her mini-me in my granddaughter who is following in her footsteps as a pitcher in fast pitch softball.

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