Free the Kids

Professor J,

Really am enjoying these summer travel posts of yours. You reference to being spoiled by German bakeries reminded me of being in one in Wismar and seeing several honeybees in the case. No one seemed to mind, least of all me! :)

I turned on the news and remembered why I haven't done that in a while. It looks as though the world has gone mad. But then thinking back over history it would have always looked like that if CNN was, say, 4.000 years old. I heard a sermon recently where the pastor said the world was "unraveling." I wondered if he'd read a history book.

Bringing things closer to home, this summer there has been a rash of parents being arrested for their parenting style. Namely, allowing children to walk to the park alone, or leaving a 4 year old in a car while a parent does a super quick errand, like dashing in and out of a small business. In other words, parents are now in danger of being reported (and worse) for the way everyone our age was brought up. Since it's summer when kids are supposed to be experiencing freedom, here's  a list of things I was allowed to do as a child.

Go into a store and buy cigarettes for my mother (my kids think I'm making that up). Get up at dawn, get dressed, and leave the house without telling anyone where I was going. Go into the houses of neighborhood kids I met even if my parents didn't know them. Drink from the garden hose. Play outside from dawn to dusk, unsupervised. Play games without uniforms and where no adult was calling the shots. Explore woods and fields on my own without a phone. Ride a bike and skateboard without a helmet. Go trick-or-treating on Halloween without adults to ruin it. Meet other kids and play without parent scheduling. Run around barefooted and dirty as long as my mother didn't have to take us anywhere.

It was awesome.

There's a movement to stem some of the nonsensical hyper fearful parenting that is going on today. There's even a blog called Free Range Kids . If you visit it you can even see video from a Japanese television show called, “My First Errand/ Hajimete no otsukai.”   where parents send children as young as TWO (!) into the world to perform small errands. Watch the video. It's charming and delightful.

 The 24 hour news cycle has made it seem as though the moment you take your eyes off your child they'll be abducted or molested. So much damage is being done to the psyches of parents and we are robbing children of self reliance in the process. Then we wonder why they seem so dependent for so long.

Over scheduling the little darlings in another issue I have with modern parenting, but you could probably refer to last week"s post to figure out why.