Motus AD:
“A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer.” – Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid
What could go wrong? For one thing kids whose lives are micro-managed by helicopter parents from cradle through their first job interview never learn to manage risks on their own.
Helicopter parents have been around at least since the dawning of the Millennials but I first reported on them 4 years ago. The post discussed pushback in Wales where some concerned parents built a park called “The Land” filled with junk where kids were still allowed to wander freely, build stuff and *gasp!* build fires.
“Today, these playgrounds are so out of sync with affluent and middle-class parenting norms that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids crouched in the dark lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was ‘This is insane.’”
As I observed at the time,
Of course, what’s considered “insane” today was part of a normal childhood just a generation or so ago. It was called “play” not “play dates.” It was how kids learned about the world, how to overcome both physical and mental obstacles, stretch their imagination, explore the unknown, solve seemingly impossible problems; and they did it all in the real world where they would reside for the rest of their lives, not the virtual world of video games.
The post was really about the Meitiv kids who were picked up by police in Silver Spring, Maryland at the behest of CPS for walking home from a neighborhood park – alone. Apparently in Maryland walking home without the accompaniment of a parental unit is illegal.
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine.
No kidding. But this type of overprotection naturally led to the next level, Growing Up By Proxy, in which the helicopter lands and morphs into a bulldozer to clear the landscape of any obstacles in the kids path. MORE HERE
I comfortably slept in flammable pajamas while surrounded by lead-painted walls filled with asbestos.
My mother read to me racist Dr. Seuss books of rhyming misogynistic fiction.
I walked to school in the 2nd grade.
We rode our bikes safely way after dark, sans helmets around ten square miles.
Our cars were prioritized with cigarette lighters, not seat belts.
I could go on, and I damn well might…
The thing is, WE HAD IT BETTER!
Suck on THAT, Gen Z motherfuckers!
Funny how in the era we find ourselves that a return to “normal” requires a law to be passed. This just shows how far government has reached past our front doors.
Great article! And, wow, great looking park! Would love to have something like that nearby. I’m just starting to let my seven year old son “practice “ walking to school. It will take him 10-15 minutes, and he has to cross two busy streets. He dawdles, gets sidetracked by rocks, water, mud, sticks, etc, and is a lousy car checker. We’ve got some work to do before he’ll be taking that trip solo. It never occurred to me that him getting himself to school might be illegal.
The thing I will say about today, versus twenty-thirty years ago, is that I think there are more pedophiles and perverts in today’s world. With Hollywood and the Lefts “Porn culture,” and the rabid promotion of all things deviant, particularly the sexualization of children, they are, at the very least, more bold. Honestly, my son would likely follow someone into their house for a piece of candy.
At least *their* kids won’t be screaming
“REE REEEE REEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”
all the way home
https://twitter.com/som3thingwicked/status/1115962138269450240
My buddy and I rode around on bikes
picking up soda bottles at 3 & 5 cents
a piece back then.When we got 25 cents
we went and bought 3 cherry bombs.1964
and 10 years old was fun!
Do they taste as good as free-range chicken?
Kids? Who has kids any more? Offspring today are merely pets.
My old home was in the middle of a fart soaked subdivision. We were ontop of one another, like rats, maybe 25ft of free space between each mud hut.
As soon as the kids were able to navigate to the other side of the block, they did so. My only requirements were to know where they were going and when they were coming back.
Some of the other kids in the neighborhood weren’t allowed this freedom. One was the girl next door, same age as my daughter. It was about 3 years before her mother allowed her to go with my daughter around the block to the girl’s house directly behind hers.
This overprotective measure really came to light with the girl’s 3 little brothers. Biggest bunch of sissy kids I’ve ever seen. 1 was older than the twins and those boys were scared of everything! Destructive little monsters, they pretty much only socialized together. Non of the 3 is exceptionally different than the others, it’s like they’re wired together.
I was a free range kid back in the 50’s and 60’s. I walked to kindergarten maybe a half mile or so back in 1959 thru Cannon Hill Park which was always fascinating in the Spring when the pollywogs were out in the small pond in the park. I walked to Cub Scout meetings after dark when I was 7 & and 8 years old etc. We rode our bikes everywhere on all the trails and hills and woods (now housing developments) close by to our house. When I was a teenager all the neighborhood boys and some of the girls snuck out late at night in the Summer to go over the bluff down to Hangman Creek (Latah Creek) to catch bull frogs and small garter snakes and sometimes bull snakes of which one of my brothers lost in an upstairs crawl space which we never saw again. We played in the park on the swings and the kid killers especially the push merry go round which no longer exists. We walked to the swimming pool every day in the Summer usually bare feet and had tons of fun back then. And when it got dark at night my dad would stand on the front porch and whistle for us and the dog to come in for the night in the Summer. And spending Summers outdoors at my grandparents farm in Dalton Gardens, Id. just N of Coeur d’ Alene, swimming at Hayden Lake at Honey Suckle beach and just generally having fun. It was lot easier growing up back then and we took advantage of it and didn’t get into too much trouble. I’m glad that our parents and all our relatives gave us that much freedom to be kids because they did the same thing or worse back in the 30’s or 40’s when they were growing up.
I was raised in rural America. We had the obligatory 1940’s movies at school about how not to have your legs cut off between coupling railroad cars and how not to blow your fingers off with blasting caps. Other than that we all got our annual tetanus shots at the beginning of summer for those inevitable nails through the foot or fishing hooks in the scalp. I didn’t know tetanus vaccines were given every ten years until I was an adult. I guess my mom was more of a helicopter parent than I realized.
My wife and her 6 brothers and 3 sisters jumped out of the upstairs window at their large house into the swimming pool just below the window during the Summer. They also like us didn’t tell their parents these things until they were much older, just because. And fortunately for them they laughed, they would’ve been in deep doo doo if they had been caught. And the best part other than a few scrapes and bruises and occasional broken arm or legs no one was ever seriously hurt or killed.
Oh, Lord, do these kids no anything about Halloween?
Like the time we got shot at with rock salt by a po’d old guy in Ephrata in the early 60’s who didn’t want any damned kids trick or treating at his house. Fortunately he missed but it scared the hell out of us.
Ah, the 50’s and early 60’s… in Seattle. I was a free range baby chicken! In my mind, I can still see and smell that wonderful town…