I can certainly understand how many parents view the world today as a horrible place, where unsupervised children are subject to kidnap, torture, rape or murder. I think it is largely a byproduct of our 24-hour news channels, who cover the most minute of details of every crime committed anywhere, just so they can fill those long hours and give people something to watch.
GAWKER had a great story about a lost 9-year old boy who wandered New York City by himself for a day, and who proclaimed that it was “The Greatest Day” of his life.
I have tried to gently chastise my oldest son for being a helicopter parent. He doesn’t seem to get the message. I’m not entirely sure his kids are allowed to visit the next room without adult supervision.
Too much supervision is bad for kids. They need to be allowed to explore, alone – without an adult. They need to experience situations where they need to figure their own way out, again – without adults giving them a nine-page bullet-pointed list of instructions.
I truly believe that our culture and our world will suffer because of the way the last generation or two of parents hover over their children. Kids today have their calendars booked so tight that I often wonder how they take time to pee, or perhaps in some households, that too is on the calendar.
I hate to resort to the time-worn phrase “when I was a kid ….” , but I don’t think there is any other great way to start out. When I was a kid, when we got home from school, we were free to roam the neighborhood. Sure, we had chores. We had homework. But we weren’t shuttled from dance lesson to hockey to piano lessons to extra-tutoring classes, and we certainly weren’t expected to be dangling from our mother’s skirts. In fact, more often than not – we where shooed out of the house and told to “go play”.
Yes, this was before the computer. Before video games. In fact – around our neck of the woods anyway – it was before color television. We only got two channels most of the time, we could watch a 3rd channel if you turned the TV antenna – but it was often still fuzzy. The only thing on TV in the afternoons was soap operas, and the only time a kid could be excused for watching a soap opera was if he was confined at home due to sickness. Otherwise the other kids would give you no peace.
At 4pm, one channel finally began to show The Mickey Mouse Club but more often than not, we were already outdoors involved in a sandlot ball game or some other adventure, and would forget to come in and watch.
In 1964, I was 9 years old, and for the first time Dad loaded us all up in our brand new 1964 Ford Falcon station wagon, and we made the long trek from South Florida to visit his brother Hubert in Tennessee.
I can remember long hours of wandering the woods, completely alone. Often unsure about how to get back, but never really afraid – just absorbed by new and exciting things. It never crossed my mind that I was unsupervised, in fact I would have been surprised had an adult wanted to tag along just to make sure I was safe.
It’s not like my parents didn’t know where I was – they just didn’t know where I was to the precise GPS coordinate. It was more of a vague “oh, he’s off playing in the neighborhood somewhere” kind of thing.
I did have boundaries – we weren’t allowed to wander outside of what was generally accepted as our neighborhood – a place that was about a half-mile long, bordered on one side by a deep canal, and on the other by the road, another canal, and vast sugar cane fields.
We were not allowed to play in the sugar cane fields. We were always told that it was because they burned the fields just before harvest, and we might get burnt, but that only happened one time a year, so I think that our restriction had more to do with my mother’s insane fear of snakes than it did with anything else. Sugar cane fields were full of common rat snakes, after field mice and other little vermin. Sure – the occasional moccasin – it was South Florida after all.
Most people acknowledge that children today spend far too much time playing indoors on electronic devices, involved in some sort of fantasy world. I’d argue that the fantasy world in a video game isn’t that much different than the fantasy worlds I found when I was a kid by reading books, but I can heartily agree that kids today need more time outdoors, more time left on their own, more time to develop a sense of how to navigate the world without a parent hovering over their shoulder.
What I see now are kids that become adults, but don’t know how to be an adult. They have to learn things as an adult that they should have learned while growing up, but because they weren’t allowed to develop any sense of self that didn’t also include Mom or Dad within view, these new adults are immature beings, often woefully under prepared for the world around them.
I see 17 and 18 year old young people today that are the emotional equivalent of kids who were 12 or 13 thirty years ago. Helicopter parents are a lot of the cause, but our whole society has devolved into a state that makes it difficult to produce a functioning 18 or 21 year old adult person. There are so many rules and laws on the books now that restrict a parents ability to raise their child in the manner they see fit.
Sure – it’s fine to have rules that prevent children from being abused – but other than a strict definition of what constitutes abuse – I think parents should be free to raise their children however they wish.
Recently, a couple took a lot of flak from a bunch of people who were just being busybodies. This couple, who seem to be very capable people, took off on a world sailing adventure, and took their small children with them. An unforeseen set of circumstances led to them having to get help for a sick child, but a lot of people seemed to think this couple should have their children taken away from them because of their unorthodox lifestyle. Hooey I say. Let them raise their kids this way – I think they’ll turn out to be marvelous adults.
Turn your kids loose. Let them be kids. Give them free time and space to explore.