You know what we called “free range” kids when I was a kid? Kids. I walked to and from school, half a mile away, every day, from the age of seven or so.
[Saturday-morning update]
The overprotected kid:
Sandseter began observing and interviewing children on playgrounds in Norway. In 2011, she published her results in a paper called “Children’s Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences.” Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear. In the paper, Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.” (2) Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. (3) Being near dangerous elements—playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that there is danger nearby. (4) Rough-and-tumble play—wrestling, play-fighting—so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. (5) Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. (6) Exploring on one’s own.
This last one Sandseter describes as “the most important for the children.” She told me, “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.”
To gauge the effects of losing these experiences, Sandseter turns to evolutionary psychology. Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia. Paradoxically, Sandseter writes, “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.” She cites a study showing that children who injured themselves falling from heights when they were between 5 and 9 years old are less likely to be afraid of heights at age 18. “Risky play with great heights will provide a desensitizing or habituating experience,” she writes.
Instead, we’re infantilizing them into what should be adulthood (the “keep your ‘child’ on your health insurance until age 26” is part of this). Another aspect of this is all the allergies that people are having as adults, due to being overprotected from germs as children. And the worst thing about all this, as she notes, is that it hasn’t even reduced risk (gee, where have we heard that before?). Anyway, it’s long, but read the whole thing.
[Bumped]
[Sunday-morning update]
“I let my nine-year-old son ride the subway alone, and got called the ‘worlds worst mom.’”
[Bumped again]
“I walked to and from school, half a mile away, every day, from the age of seven or so.” In the snow. Uphill, both ways. Without air. And loved it!
Only half a mile? Wuss.
It’s all part of the Cult of the Child. The problem is that this infantilism now extends into one’s twenties and thirties. Encourage people to have a hedonistic lifestyle; encourage people not to save, to obsess on sports or on the latest TV episode. Do this rather than encouraging responsibility and morality. But that would be part of a) The Patriarchy b) Evil Christianity c) Western Culture.
As a result, we can’t even decide on our own health insurance without “adult supervision.”
This has been going on for some time. Decades ago, I decided that if I ever wrote a book of social criticism, I’d title it “A Nation of Children.”
At the same time, some young people come out of childhood with good values. Let’s not forget that the majority of people who enlisted in the military after 9/11 were Millennials. They knew what they were signing up for and still stepped up. They did this despite being raised under the self-esteem movement where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.
Tar. Feathers. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.
“Hold still, sir, while we figure this out.”
Oh, it won’t take long to figure it out. There are plenty of deserving bureaucrats to practice on, too. Before you know it, the tar and feathering process can be as smooth running as a well-functioning assembly line.
Tar. Feathers. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.
No advanced assembly skills required. You can’t overdo. Make sure tar is hot enough to be viscous. Have many buckets full handy. Feathers optional but highly recommended.
Wrong, some disassembly required.
Someone ought to write a book about this over obsession with safety…
I sometimes walked a long way, too, when I was very young. One of the big streets had a crossing guard, but the others didn’t. I have to wonder how we made it before all these nitwits could pretend to care.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about “whose kids are they?” The state is saying, clearly and with threat of force… “these are not your kids, they belong to us.” Another example of an oversized state.
My childhood was during an era now rightly remembered for irrational fear of child abduction. Yet as a third grade student I rode my bicycle a couple of miles to school and back. No one called the police. In fact, that’s why the school had a bike rack.
One of the kids was 10, and they were walking one lousy mile alone, and that’s a cause for concern? I was sure this was satire…. but it doesn’t appear to be. This is freaking insane is what it is!
When I was in Kindergarten (and after that, too) I had a ride to school but walked home – over 2 miles. No big deal, other kids did too.
Hell, when I was 10, I went, ALONE, from my house to my grandmother’s house. This included changing planes at JFK (I lived in California, Grandma lived in UK), then taking a bus, then a train, to get from HEathrow to my Grandmother’s area, and then a taxi for the last bit (She couldn’t drive). I’d done it many times with my parents, so doing it alone was no big deal. Yet, now, a kid that age is a cause for concern for going to a park a mile away?
This is hopelessly pathetic.
When Admiral ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ Farragut was ten, he was a midshipman in the US Navy. He commanded his first ship at twelve.
Before Richard Branson was ten, his mother decided he was too shy and too much of a mommy’s boy, so she let him out of the car a few miles from where they lived, and told him to find his own way home to toughen him up.
Yet today, apparently, a ten year old can’t even be trusted to walk to school.
As you say, the deliberate infantilization of young humans is insane. Part of it is probably due to parents of one-child families being increasingly scared of losing that one, whereas older families had multiple kids, and the other part is probably just the usual bureaucratic power-grab.
I don’t think the problem was with the 10 year old being out without the parents. The story says that Maryland law required the younger kid (6 years old) to be supervised by someone at least 13. So the issue appears to be that the 10 year old was supervising the 6 year old on the walk home.
Never even got on a bus until high school, when it was too far to conveniently walk.
Yep. Definitely too many helicopters out there.
Apart from the obsession with the sea of impending perils that are now seen to be lurking behind every bush and letterbox one the sadder aspects of this process is the complete lack of any faith in the capacity of children to be capable or responsible.
Growing up in New Zealand in the late 70s my entire class of 9 year olds were assigned to training as what would, in the US, be known as crossing guards. The following year, this group of 10 year olds, along with kids from other classes, was responsible for controlling three road crossings in morning rush hour traffic at a major intersection. We set up the lollypop signs, we went out into the middle of the street to put out cones, we decided when to stop the traffic for the kids (and random adults) to cross, and at the end of the shift we packed everything away behind one of the local stores and went off to class. For this entire exercise there was, at times, one adult supervising us, but not playing any active part.
Needless to say we all then walked home alone, well, except for those kids who had bikes. In passing, I had been walking home alone for several years by then with the primary parental instruction being not to dawdle. School patrol (crossing guard) was a bit of a pain at the time but looking back I am impressed by the levels of trust our teachers placed in these children, and the level of responsibility expected of us. In contrast the contemporary approach seems to be to do all possible to limit the development of children into responsible adults.
In truth I am not sure how anyone can be a good parent anymore without attracting the unwelcome eye of the state, and its army of busy-bodies.
Markus, you beat me to the punch!!
Same for me, 4th Grade, 9 years old, we were assigned to a crossing that was within sight of the school, for our first year. The second year, some of us took our Orange Patrol Belts home every afternoon, so we could be ‘on station’, ready to go earlier than most kids were headed to school. Some of those stations might be 3/4 mile away from school, on 4 lane, divided highways, WELL out of sight of the school.
Here’s the stupid part of all this thinking, to me anyway.
100 years ago, most American children rode horses, or drove small animal carts, or WALKED miles to school. They had chores that required using sharp and pointed implements to complete the daily tasks. They often had younger siblings they THEY helped daily getting to and from wherever or that they supervised doing chores with pointy implements!!!
There are countries in the World where those things still apply to this very minute. Both historically and elsewhere NOW, those places had or have little or no such thing as ‘911 emergency services’. They have no house phone or cell phones in modern Third World countries, OR the poor who have children doing chores, herding stock or walking miles away from home, are too poor to have a cell phone.
So given those things, what makes WESTERN children so damned delicate or stupid or foolish that with a cell phone never far away, teachers, adults never far away and 911 services readily available for most of us, that said Western Children cannot be ‘trusted’ to take care of themselves for some period of time?
What happened to change OUR collective attitudes about children, young adults, schooling, natural abilities? My favorite example is this. From early 1942 until 1945, the U.S. Military was enlisting farm boys who had NEVER even driven a car or truck, to fly THE most advanced aircraft of the day, to win THE biggest war the world has ever known. Likewise they operated. repaired and maintained mechanical and electrical equipment that hadn’t existed the year before. I remember my wife’s uncle telling us about guys he was a the Army with during WWII, who had NEVER seen, indoor plumbing, electric lights or airplanes first hand. But they trained to fly and operate the military gear of the days. Many had NO high school diploma!!
But by the mid 1950’s, you HAD to have a college degree to do that same jobs and be an officer.
The simple answer would seem to be, and I’m just guessing, that most under educated, or uneducated, foreign children are smarter than we and our children are AND that this inherent ignorance holds over until well into our later lives. OR, it’s all a bunch of touchy feely BS, being pushed by people with too much time on their hands.
Those foreign kids haven’t spent twenty years being schooled into believing they’re unable to do anything other than what they’re told.
They’re educated, to the extent they can be, they’re just not schooled.
“what makes WESTERN children so damned delicate or stupid or foolish that with a cell phone never far away, teachers, adults never far away and 911 services readily available for most of us, that said Western Children cannot be ‘trusted’ to take care of themselves for some period of time?”
Their lawsuit-happy parents and the lawsuit-happy ambulance chasers that convince parents to file all sorts of legal actions against their neighbors vis a vis suing school districts and municipalities when their delicate flower gets a boo-boo, that’s what.
All of the “no peanut products allowed within 500 ft of a school” rules are the result of one or two nitwits who have sued the people they charged to educate their child; apparently, these aducated professionals are trustworthy enough to watch after, discipline, and mold the minds of young people, but they’re wholly incompetent when it comes to making context-specific decisions on a daily basis in their classroom?
It never ceases to amaze me when I hear of some dolt suing their local government or school board over something that they should have been able to handle on their own in the first place. I’m still not sure if there’s a cognitive disconnect for these people inasmuch as they don’t understand that “government money” coems from their neighbors and other property tax payers, or if they intentionally files suits such as these as part of their own little income-redistribution schemes.
I’m really hoping that the Gen-X’ers kids turn out slightly less delicately, as they seem to be the last generation of kids raised during the “just let your kids play” era, but I don’t see too many signs of this behaviour waning, unfortunately.
See also: the woman in the UK who sent an invoice for reimbursement to the parents of a child who no-showed to her kid’s birthday party. WTF is this world coming to?
The key phrase is: “we have a responsibility as part of our duty to check on people’s welfare.”
Do they?
I have zero expectation that the police have a responsibility to check on my welfare, and find the idea patently offensive because where are the limits to that? If this is in fact true then our police forces are suffering from a serious state of mission creep from what I consider their core mission in the community: capture criminals and guard the peace.
Don’t even get me started on the paramilitarization thing, which has bugged me since the 80s…
We live in Houston. My wife’s family has for many years had a small cabin on Galveston Bay. The story is often told that when her dad was a boy in the 1930’s, he and several of his brothers (some of whom were teenagers) were allowed to ride their bikes to the cabin and spend several days there, fishing and crabbing and taking their little rowboat out on the bay. It’s about a 35 mile trip one way, and the cabin had no phone. Far from being stressed out by the danger, their mother was probably delighted to have a few days of peace and quiet in the house.