From a young age, I was allowed to leave the house by bike and be home by dinner. I still have scars from that, but, you know, it’s not really terrorizing.
Let us contrast this with whatever the fuck passes for parenting these days.
We’re buying the concept that parents can’t raise their own kid, and thus the government needs to step in.
Well, some are. But seriously, the past 40 years of destroying critical thinking worked.
There are few reasons to be thankful for being 46. We don’t exist in the media, and we’re somehow never mentioned. Boomers … Millennials. Um, you missed a step.
This is not an issue in the Netherlands. There are not giant vehicles, kids have autonomy at a younger age, and society is structured around allowing family and play time. Infrastructure allows kids to visit friends and play safely. Kids can run off and do anything, adults rarely intervene. Its a kid paradise compared to the US today and is more aligned with the 80s and 90s you describe in the US. I remember those times too. But its not perfect here either.
There is a line between autonomy and trauma. A kid is free to make a decision, but also free to suffer horrendous consequences without any empathy or adult support to help them recover. At least in my experience. For instance, a kid did not bring gloves to school and thus was not prepared for a sudden sleet storm in the ride home. Asking for help and telling people they were in pain and scared only to be responded to with the dutch equivilant of suck it up kid - you aren’t made of sugar. Thats trauma for damn sure that will come back to guide their actions as an adult.
There has to be a balance, and I fear many peoples are not meeting it.
Interesting perspective. And yeah, having functioning transit and infrastructure changes the calculus.
But I’m going to push back on the trauma point. I had such moments growing up, and the net result was making sure I had my gloves in the future to avoid a repeat.
That’s a fair push back. I would counter that the line between lesson learned and “I’ll never forget and am angry about it” is a fine one. Deeper conversation, though.
I’d say, without evidence, that parenting has improved dramatically over time. Despite all the issues with parenting today, I really do believe it used to be significantly worse going back further and further into the past.
The main difference is awareness. People see more now how what they do affects their children in the long term. Abuse can be made immediately visible, and is often illegal. Positive reinforcement has taken a step forward in place of negative reinforcement and especially corporal punishment.
And yet we still are in a position where more can be done.
One of the biggest things we’ve lost over time is unfortunately the ability for parents to spend time with their families. Both parents work all day. They don’t have time for their kids. Some parents work multiple jobs. This is a symptom of the worsening wealth inequality, and really an economic issue more than anything.
There are still bad parents, of course. I knew a couple growing up. It’s just more visible now due to increased awareness.
I don’t mean to paint with a broad brush, but growing up, the fact that both of my parents only worked once I started elementary school was pretty standard. Diapers done, time to get a master’s!
Pickup trucks are 12 feet tall and go 75 in school zones now
I’ll bite. I’m a millennial and grew up in the suburbs of a major US city, with my childhood straddling the 9/11 terror attacks. I can remember some of what it was like before and certainly after. I’m also now a parent of 2 kids.
As a kid, I had age appropriate freedom to play outside with friends, explore the neighborhood on my bike, go to the library, etc., as long as I told my parents where I was going and when I would be back. My first cell phone was a Nokia brick that i only carried on long bike rides in case I fell and broke a bone or something. My wife had the same level of freedom as a kid.
We are raising our kids in the suburbs of a different major US city, and we intend to give them that same level of age appropriate freedom when they are old enough to handle it. They’re pretty young, and our oldest is just now allowed (by our home rules) to stay home by herself for chunks of time under an hour. For the most part, it’s a trial run to see if she can handle that freedom. We don’t let our kids out to roam the neighborhood yet, because they can’t handle that, and the drivers on the streets we live on can’t be bothered to obey the speed limits.
I expect the local government to provide the support they are obligated to provide: Enforce the speed limits so people aren’t ripping down our 25 mph street at 40mph and provide a quality education. That’s honestly the main concerns I have. I’m not worried about someone snatching my kids up. My kids will talk about Paw Patrol or Monster High until the kidnappers cry uncle and give them back for some much needed peace and quiet. I worry about the idiot drivers scrolling instagram and texting, going 15 mph over the limit, and making my kids into a stain on the pavement.
I was 22 when 9/11 happened, so slightly different experience. On the plus side, I was able to drink it off at my local bar alongside everyone else just staring at the TVs in disbelief. It is also the last time I’ve seen an EXTRA edition done by a paper. I was between my time running the college paper and starting my professional career (in fact, I had to drive 3,000 miles for my interview because flights weren’t yet readily available in October).
But, enough storytime. My essential belief is this: Violent crime was far higher in my childhood than it currently is, and yet I was allowed to just bike around all day. Why the fuck do kids need cellphones to be “safe”? I get and appreciate your decision to roll responsibility out in stages. I think I was about 12 when my parents allowed me to have a friend over while they went out for the night. They ordered pizza delivery and came home to discover we’d turned all the lights on – like, every last one in the house – because we had no situational awareness that electricity costs money. Oh, and we split one of Mom’s beers.
You don’t learn the rules by playing by them; you learn them by testing boundaries.
I’m with you on the crime aspects for sure. The “safety” aspect of cell phones probably isn’t physical safety, but the sanity of the parents. Personally, when my kids are at the age where they can go out and about on their own, I want them to have access to a cell phone for emergency communication, not because I’m worried about them being victims of a crime or anything. I don’t want them having to ride their bikes home in a thunderstorm or tornado.
I also think the reporting on parents being overprotective is probably overemphasized and then extrapolated to large groups but not as strongly present in reality. Or just confined to certain demographics/locations. Who knows, man?
I mean, I get the weather-related concern, but part of raising a kid is teaching them what to do when they see incoming severe weather. If there’s time to get home, great. If not, a phone is not going to change the timeline, and the best solution is to duck into a friend’s house nearby, from where a parent can call to confirm your safety.
It honestly baffles me that we’re regressing so far as a society that instead of education and experience, we want digital leashes.
I have nothing against leashes in general, but that’s maybe better for a BDSM scene than a kid’s Saturday afternoon.
I think we are saying similar things in different ways here. I’m not advocating for a lack of critical thinking and education. However, if technology for instantaneous communication exists, there’s no reason not to use it to check in. It’s a contingency plan, not a daily system (once my kids are even old enough to responsibility have a cell phone). I don’t want my kids tethered to me, but they also don’t have knowledge and life experience I do yet. To gain it, they have to be educated and live it, as you’re saying. My take on it, is that me picking up the phone to tell them what to do in an emergency situation, reinforcing what I’ve already taught them, is a valuable part of that learning, and I’m not going to forego a tool like a cell phone for that. The world has changed, and we as parents are forced to adapt to it in some fashion, as every generation before has had to do with their times.
I agree that we are largely in agreement. In the '80s, there were payphones. I’d be sent out with a quarter in case of an emergency. Same interest in safety, just far less expensive than a phone plan.
I never used that quarter, because if I really needed to call, a friend’s house was close enough by that a payphone would have been a mile or two out of the way in an emergency.
This, of course, was back in the day when you had your home phone number memorized, so in case of the unexpected, any reasonable adult stood ready to help, including (glad we don’t have downvotes on this instance) the police. The social contract wasn’t just about economics, it was also knowing that approaching an authority figure meant you knew you’d get help, as opposed to drawn guns.
Oh, I never wore a helmet. They were quite sweaty in Arizona heat, and really, the only real risk of injury was knees and elbows, as I knew to bail ahead of going head over handlebars. I picked my bike out of the scrub several times, sometimes having to walk it home with multiple injuries that would call for Neosporin, although, with my mom being a hippie, they only used calendula oil.
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We were also the first generation to realize we didn’t need to have kids. I’m the proud father of zero people because by the time I could have had one, I already was aware that childrearing was expected simply so that we’d grow some good soldiers and consumers. It doesn’t surprise me that people straddling the death of the social contract in the form of decades of stagnant wages weren’t the most thrilled to raise their kids to believe the system was still intact. That’s going to bleed into their educational expectations, and frankly, we love complaining about why what we got as kids is no longer available.
This said, we are a completely ignored generation precisely because we saw the death of the social contract: work hard, get ahead, buy a house. Instead, we got annual layoffs, no stability to even start adulthood as emulated by Boomer parents, and basically being erased because our experience wasn’t useful to politicians or advertisers – our concerns were aggressively ignored in favour of the Carl Icahn school of American society to distract from the systemic destruction. So when you critique what my generation is like as parents, consider the conditions we were raised under.
There’s a reason I decided the correct decision was to become a homeless hippie.
Millennials and past never expected any sort of social contract because it was shredded during our formative years. I suspect a large part of the reason Boomers refuse to give up power is handing it off to Gen X would result in significant structural reforms that would be bad for billionaires. If they can hold off until Millennials, then we can safely arrive at “there was never any social contract. Bootstraps!”
Handing power to the ones who saw the collapse unfold in real time is anathema to the military-industrial complex, as well as corporations that make more money in a minute than I have in my entire lifetime.
