The older I get, the more I realize that things that seem normal to me are outrageous to others. Yeah, I went to the movies by myself at age six. I opened my first checking account at ten. I started making my own clothes in the fourth grade. I didn't know other kids didn't do these things, even in the 1960s. Just recently I talked to an old friend from grade school. She told my brother and me that she always loved coming to our house because we got away with so much, and our parents let us do anything. That was a surprise to both of us. We thought it was just normal stuff. And really, it was just normal stuff.
In the 21st century, I walked my kids to school and back quite a few times to teach them how to do it, but then the school went ballistic when they did it without me. Managing "proper" childcare became pretty grim between the time I was widowed and when I achieved work-from-home status. But the independence I had as a child must have bled over into my parenting, because to this day, people tell me how brave my daughters are for doing normal adult things, like travel, handling money, and making their own decisions. I now wonder how they'll raise their own kids. Maybe they'll go somewhere like Amsterdam!
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
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4 comments:
I grew up like you. Out playing all day, walked everywhere. I feel sad for kids today. They seem to be raised by fear.
This is why 50 is the new 30.
All jokes aside, it is an interesting observation and I wish I understood why this is a trend. Perhaps advances in safety and medicine make life more certain and we are less likely to take other risks? Perhaps people having fewer kids and so being less willing to put them at risk? Perhaps TV, phone, and internet as entertainment substitutes? Perhaps the emergence of the government as a protector of children's safety? I don't know, but I suspect it will continue to have an effect on our national character for years to come.
My mother never asked "where are you going", only "where have you been".
Often on a Saturday I'd walk 2 miles to the center of town, Catch a Peter Pan Bus 14 miles into the city, and go to see a movie(with Milk Duds), then reverse the journey home. I started doing this about 10.
I grew up in a small Ohio town of about 600 peeps. Everyone knew everyone else so it was normal for us to disappear between breakfast and supper, occasionally stopping at my house or someone’s house for lunch. If we had enough spending money, lunch might be a soda and potato chips while sneaking into an old abandoned house, and maybe play a game of baseball well after sunset. Learning to drive at 12 or 13 in a friend’s old farm truck in the field, or wandering through the town dump looking for things to break, or ice skating down the creek so long your feet were frozen to your shoes - those were typical. My parents gave me wide latitude back then, but they also knew they could find me by calling one or two or three people who had likely spotted me that day. I never stopped exploring, even as an adult, and being curious about what’s over that hill, or what’s under that rock, or in that old box of junk. I raised my kids in a similar fashion. I taught them to look beyond their own familiar surroundings. I took them to see the Great Wall of China, the remnants of the Holocasts, and the waterways of Amsterdam. They learned a second language in elementary school, bungee jumped off a train trestle in Tennessee and attended Space Camp by age 12, and worked in a soup kitchen every Christmas. Two married Asian girls and live in Asia & one met an Aussie and lives there. They are still exploring this world along with my grandkids !
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