This short article is basically a bunch of quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... (2007).
How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
51–60 of 534 posts
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#52I suspect this is not just an American or British or solely cultural thing but also a number-of-children thing. This seems like it would also be the natural response to having fewer children. If you have 3-10 kids, you can "afford" to let them off the leash so to speak, if only psychologically. Your kids going missing or getting hurt is an eventuality anyway, maybe. If you have 1 or 2 kids, you are investing a lot mo…
I would say it isn't just that you can "afford" to let them off the leash more it's that you don't have the time/energy to keep track of them. If you are dealing with an infant a toddler and a 5 year old, you are simply won't be able to follow the 8 year old around. Let's say they run off with some frinds with out permission you can either leave the 3 other kids alone to find you 8 year old (who is going to be home when they get hungry anyways) or you can say, "fuck it"
I got more important things to handle.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it h…
To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right th…
Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.
Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#54Crime in many parts of America is higher than it was in medieval and middle ages in Europe, judged by intentional homicide rates. Also, crime approximated by intentional murder rate, outside of periods of war, is historically higher now than in history. source: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/#germany
Ummm. Your citation has the exact opposite conclusion to what you say. So much so that I had to read it 3 times to make sure I wasn't missing anything. What precisely do you mean?
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#55This is kind of disconcerting.. It's like the government is forcing the future generations to be acclimated to imprisonment or lack of freedom and lack of independence... so that they can be controlled..
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#56I think it happened in one generation. My generation roamed quite extensively starting at about 7 years old. My daughter's generation did not. We drove her to her friends houses (or their parents to ours). Sometimes they would play outside. And I'm not saying there was no roaming, but it started much later and was not as geographically broad.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it h…
This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own. Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of…
Yes, I live in Japan now and I see that every day. One note though: In cities there's actually a watch organised, every street corner there's a different parent or grand parent waiting at a specific time for the children to arrive. Also, older kids are officially tasked with guiding the younger ones on the way to school.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#58What's up with parents driving kids to school? My generation, born in the late 70s, was rarely dropped off or picked up from school.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#59I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason. In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag. I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff…
Man that reminds me so much of my growing up experience. Spent most free time outside on a bike, playing with a football, climbing trees and only coming back indoors for food.
Same here.
I grew up on a 80 acre farm. We lived there until I was 7 and my sister was 10. My parents didn't even get home from work until 7PM.
We had a full on welding and machine shop and a pretty fantastic place for woodworking in the shop. We had two creeks that were lined with trees hanging over them.
My dad had pretty much taught us how weld and use the plasma cutter and drill press and all the wood working stuff. Looking back I even find it insane to teach your 6 year old how to weld. But somehow I am still alive.
But the last few years we lived there my sister asked if we could build a tree-house in one of the trees that branched out over a creek. My mom said to go for it. My dad did help build the base (he was a mechanical engineer) and we did the rest. It was massively unsafe now that I think about it 33 years later.
The funny thing is we only had one major emergency at that house. My sister was making a frozen pizza and didn't check when she started preheating the oven. There were a few dozen glazed doughnuts in a box in the oven. They burst into flames and she pulled the entire rack onto the floor. We got the fire to go out.
And a few days later my dad taught me a lot about replacing a kitchen floor.
Re: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it h…
This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own. Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of…
I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.