And yet the strange thing is that I remember the best days of my childhood being those when my parents were no where in sight. Being out in my backyard or the next door vacant lot with some of the kids from around the neighbourhood. I don't remember my mother ever playing with me, and for the most part, I don't remember wanting her to.
I don't ever remember venturing very far -- my mother was probably always within yelling distance, or if she wasn't, another adult was. The farthest I went was walking to school, which I did without an adult from kindergarten onwards. Most of the time with other kids; some times alone.
It's still more freedom than my child has, more than he'll probably ever have, until he's a teenager and the wonder of adventuring through the neighbourhood is long lost.
It's just a fact of life these days. I don't know how I might circumvent it, since anyone these days who lets their child have the freedoms that were common in the 1970s gets lambasted for it. Even if I did let The Boy out to play on his own, who the heck would he play with? No one else is allowed to randomly wander the neighbourhood.
So this article was very interesting. One of the things I did most as a child was curl up with a good book; it never occurred to me that my child, not used to adventuring, might lose the love of doing so within a book if he was never able to do so on his own.
I'm not sure the situation is as dire as he notes but it's food for thought anyway. And while I don't think I'm going to let my kid randomly wander around on his own any time soon, maybe I'll hover a little further away at the playground next time.
You know, six feet away rather than within catching distance.
4 comments:
I worry that I am the other extreme - not protective enough! On election day, when I went to vote at the polling booth (which was also my workplace) I lost E for over 45 minutes. While I had many people out looking for him, I remained relatively calm. Of course he turned up safely after some kids located him.
But I have an extremely independent child - who has been this way since birth. As a tiny baby he refused to be held while trying to fall asleep and needed to be alone(!) What baby wants/needs that? If I tried to protect him more - he'd only want to run further away.
I refuse to believe the world is less safe than when we were kids - only that we are more fearful due to more reporting. Crime stats are down relative to population size than 20, 30 years ago. Gosh, I have no problem living without a cell phone while others can't believe that. What if you have an emergency, they ask? Well what did people do before cell phones were commonplace?
Well I've taken this off topic.
My point is we parent according to what our kids need. I'm just happy I ended up with a kid that matches my parenting style. :)
Funny, I just had a conversation about this topic with my stepmom. We were sitting outside watching her almost 5 year old granddaughter bike around the driveway. My stepmom asked if I wore a helmet when I was that age and I laughed. Helmets were not a thing of our childhood, you know?
But I think I will be an overprotective parent, too. I've done plenty of babysitting in my day, day camp counselor, etc, and when it's someone else's kid I am ridiculous. I remember those high school summers at day camp, I spent the whole day counting the kids to make sure we hadn't lost anyone as we moved around the playground. I even got nervous on Sunday night when my step-niece wandered out of our sight IN MY PARENTS BACKYARD. Safest place in the world! She'll be five in a few weeks, it's not like she's two. Anyway, I have no idea why I am rambling in your comments (I am super tired and possibly delirious today) other than to say I'm with you. We'll see how I actually am when it's my own kid, but so far evidence supports "overprotective eagle-eye mom". Woo! :)
Erin -- I can be super-overprotective with other people's kids, too, but I'm becoming the opposite with my own. I think it's because (a) it's on my own head, and (b) I know her so much better than I ever knew, e.g., my babysittees, so I have a much more detailed sense of what she can and can't cope with.
Now, that said, I've become gradually more and more laid back as she gets bigger; I was pretty paranoid and uptight about a lot of things when she was tiny (and my kid was really tiny -- 20 lb at age 2 -- which probably didn't help). The shift has been partly just watching her grow up and become more capable -- it's hard to convince yourself that your kid can't safely climb a tree when you routinely arrive to pick her up from after-school care and find her hanging upside down from the monkey bars -- but also partly remembering my own childhood. I don't really remember what I was and wasn't allowed to do at two or three, but I definitely remember what was normal for five- and six-year-olds in my childhood, and my heavens we had so much more freedom and responsibility! (As in, my mom was considered the slightly nutty overprotective mom on our street because she made me tell her which friend's house I was going to when I went out to play.)
As Chabon points out, though, it's hard to send your kid outside to play when nobody else is doing it. In addition to which my kid has another parent who is, to put it charitably, not fully on board with the evidence-based approach to parental risk assessment (as in, he doesn't think I should let her play out in the corridor of our building, because "there are creepy people everywhere!" And believe me, this is not a building in which he needs to be worried about that). So I'm for sure not as "free range" as I'd like to be.
And I totally make the kid wear a bike helmet.
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