In many ways, it’s a safer time to be a kid than any other in history. Mortality rates are at their lowest levels. Fewer children are going missing and being killed. Even traffic fatalities have declined. Our worst numbers are down, but our minute-by-minute anxieties represent a different kind of threat to American childhood.
This threat is wholesale, it’s destructive, and it’s a signal that as adults, we’re the ones who need to do some growing up.
This week’s news that Montgomery County police once again picked up a 10-year-old boy and his 6-year-old sister walking home unsupervised has rekindled a national debate about the idea of “free-range” kids. The first time around, the parents were found guilty of “unsubstantiated neglect.” This time they’re planning to sue.
How has it come to this?
As a mother of two girls and a boy — 21, 16 and 12 — I get the fear. I do. But we mustn’t allow it to control us. Children have to learn to navigate the world, and that’s not something that happens from the inside of a car.
My childhood was so free-range I might as well have been a bison. I left in the morning and ran home when the streetlights came on, as did every child around me. In most black families I knew, both parents worked. Nobody had the inclination or the money to spend on child care for kids older than 8. And everybody had to watch their little brothers and sisters.
Recounting those times, people posting on social media say they were able to “ride our bikes miles from home” or “ride the Metro and the bus alone” or wander “the streets of our developments to school, parks and friends’ houses on foot.”
These experiences taught us to be responsible for our own well-being and amusement. We learned how to negotiate street signs, people, boredom. We got ourselves into things and mostly got ourselves out of them.
Yes, times are different. One colleague points out that he roamed as a kid, but he also got beatings, never wore a seat belt and hunted with high-powered rifles as a 10-year-old. “Do we really think how we were raised is anything to emulate?” he asks.
“We didn’t know then about the epidemic rates of child sexual abuse. Kids weren’t regularly snatched up on the streets,” said someone else.
Except that abductions and child murders by strangers are rare, experts say. For years, many state agencies have reported declines in missing-children cases, wrote David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in a 2013 Post opinion piece.
The big difference is actually the way we parents have let our worst fears control us. Even those with no kids feel entitled to judge. We’re all media-saturated — we hear repeated and graphic details about every child tragedy. And those images hijack our common sense.
The world may feel differently, but children still need the same things. Chief among them, they need to learn how to rely on themselves, because Momma and Daddy are not always going to be there.
Here’s the overarching point: The world may feel differently, but children still need the same things. Chief among them, they need to learn how to rely on themselves, because Momma and Daddy are not always going to be there.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,” wrote J.R.R. Tolkien in “The Lord of the Rings.” But we have to do it anyway or we send our kids into the world only half ready.
When my husband and I separated, I moved five minutes from my old house, specifically to a neighborhood where my kids could walk everywhere. As a 9-year-old, my son walked to school and to the skateboard park and, a few years later, to the gym and Chipotle. If adults saw him and his friends walking, no one called to report it. If the police saw them walking, they must have figured he’d make it home by and by.
He has lost track of time on occasion, and I’ve driven the neighborhood near-panicked with his sister riding shotgun trying to find him.
My mom did the same when I came home past dark once from a softball game. She finally called the police who, presumably, had started looking for me. I walked into the house, and my mom was crying and my dad was angry. I felt so bad that it was all the punishment I needed. It helped teach me consideration for those who worry about you so, a little lesson that carried me into adulthood.
As a 13-year-old, my middle daughter was walking home from the park. She saw a group of teen boys in the distance. She worried that they might catcall or even just say hi to her. She was shy and couldn’t abide the idea of walking past them. “Mommy, I was scared they might say something to me, so I just ran away.”
I soothed her. “The next time, sweetie, you might just want to say hi, or ignore them, and keep it moving. I know it’s uncomfortable,” I told her, “but you don’t want to grow up to be someone who never outgrows her fears so she allows them to rule her world.”
We already have too many adults like that.
© The Washington Post 2015
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