This lady is getting a lot of flack for letting her 4th grader take the New York subway home by himself. Despite both her and her kid looking exactly like the kind of New Yorkers that irritate the hell out of me, I’m going to side with her.
I’ve never been on the New York subway, but I have been on the Washington, D.C. subway and the Chicago el train. I’m going to assume the situations are somewhat similar (and not at all like the Seattle ferry/bus system.) The kid is nine? He should be able to get from Point A to Point B during daylight hours in Manhattan by himself. I distinctly remember wandering around both Milwaukee and Chicago as a kid younger than 9. Now, that might not have been by the design of my parents (I tended to wander off from the group and still do) but I knew not to walk into traffic, get into vans with strangers, and, in the case of Chicago, knew how to bribe a cop, so I didn’t end up dead.
I think we’re living in a time where a strange thing is happening: In many respects kids are being robbed of their childhood – hypersexuality of the MTV culture aimed at kids, for example – and in other respects, kids are being treated like they need to be protected and have their days always structured, which prevents them from maturing at an appropriate pace.
This lady at least gets it mostly right:
“At Free Range Kids, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school-age children go outside, they need a security detail.”
Lose the stupid bicycle helmets and you have a deal. (I strongly believe the several bicycle-related concussions I received between the ages of 6 and 15 just tenderized my head to an appropriate level.)
There is a giant field in a schoolyard about five blocks from my house, and another pretty big field in a park three blocks from my house. Unless there is an organized league soccer or baseball game going on there, they are almost always empty. When I was a kid my friends a giant field was more precious than gold. My friends Bryant, Josh, Scott, our brothers, whatever other boys around our age happened to be around, and I were always playing pickup football or baseball at the local park, the farmer’s hay field across from our house, or across the three connected lawns belonging to Bryant’s parents and his two neighbors. So I always feel kind of depressed looking at the giant, empty fields.
I know there are kids around. The field is adjacent to a giant school, after all. I occasionally see kids scurrying between one house where there is a PS3 to the other house where there in an Xbox360. And they play on those soccer and baseball teams with hoards of parents watching. So why aren’t the kids out playing by themselves?
I think some of it that video games are so much more prevalent and, frankly, fun. Parents need to step in and tell us what our parents told us: You can play video games when it is dark or raining. And even then you can probably find something fun to do outside. I won’t tell you my friends and I didn’t play the hell out of our Atari 2600s and our NESes, but that was usually when it was too cold, rainy, or dark to be outside.
I think a lot of it, though, is that parents won’t let their 8, 9, 10, and 11 year old kids have a little independence. This is opposed to how my friends and I were raised. Here’s the day of my friends and I on about any summer day or weekend from grades 2 to college: Crawl out of bed, go have some cereal, complain to mom that the cereal she bought is terrible, get in a fight with the sibling until mom throws everyone out, grab the bikes go looking for friends, find friends, play, descend en mass to one of the houses for lunch, play, realize that it’s almost dark, go home and eat. Repeat the next day. If we did stick around the house it’s because we had a pool and a nice woods to roam around in.
One parent I talked to about this said she was scared off all the sexual predators the police website indicated were around. But those guys were around when I was a kid. And unlike today, we didn’t have a handy website to indicate who some of them were. In fact, I think I would pity the guy who would have tried to kidnap one of us. We would have had him stabbed (boys were allowed – no encouraged – to carry jackknives in those days, as long as they had their Boy Scout totin’ chit) and my friend Scott probably would have had either him or his car on fire that was less encouraged – Scott was just a pyro) within 14 seconds of the guy getting aggressive.
Of course, that’s if a predator could catch us in the first place. With our bikes and hard-earned knowledge of every shortcut, animal trail, and, most importantly, fence in town on both public and private property, anyone on foot or in a car would have been hard pressed to catch one of us if we could get to our bikes. In fact, a great number of the local citizenry and law enforcement officials that we annoyed in some way or another to the point of pursuit were hard pressed to catch us on more than one occasion.
Remember the scene in E.T. where the boys are fleeing with E.T. on their bikes? Spielberg got that kind of right, but I always thought those kids would never have needed E.T. to bail them out with flying, especially when facing federal officials unfamiliar with the local area. In contrast, the FBI where I live now would have their hands on E.T. in about 10 seconds of the kid getting on the bike, assuming the kids even had a bike or the cardiovascular capacity to operate one.
I wonder if someday I’ll watch E.T. with my kids and have this conversation:
Me: How did you kids like the movie?
Kids: It was OK, but kind of unrealistic.
Me: Oh? Weren’t the alien effects good enough?
Kids: Oh, no. E.T. was fine. We just have a hard time believing that there would be a horde of boys riding around on bikes without helmets or their parents hovering nearby. And don’t get us started on how the kids went out in their neighborhood unsupervised on Halloween.
I thought maybe it was just peculiar to the Northwest. I didn’t grow up here, I figured maybe it’s just how kids are here. So I asked around to friends in the Midwest who live near fields. After convincing them that I’m not some kind of pedophile who wants to know where the young boys are, they told me they don’t see a lot of kids playing pick-up ball or otherwise marauding around outside in large groups.
I seem to remember packs of girls roaming around, too. But this was before girls were supposed to be interested in sports, so we never really noticed. But I think they were probably playing the same as us.
I wonder about this: How will kids be able to negotiate adult life if they never learned how to master their neighborhoods as kids? We learned how to get from place-to-place, settle disputes amongst ourselves, deal with the adults we inevitably pissed off, exact revenge on said adults after they called the cops and/or our parents, apply basic first aid, and in general make day-to-day decisions all without being able to rely on our parents. Where will the kids who have parents that are afraid to let them or make them leave the house learn this?
