https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our...
I truly consider that my kid will be able to use the internet against me in ways inimaginable. Its exciting!
I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do for my son to give him the same... incentives.
As a parent I came to realize that kids are unlikely to try new things spontaneously if they already have an activity they could be doing which meets their expectations of interest. So as a parent it was incumbent on me to give them the exposure to new experiences in order for them to develop their own understanding of what they did and didn't like.
I was outside all the time before age 13 - after that I started going to the mall and talking on the phone and working on the computer in lieu of outdoor activities.
This was back in the early 90s. No need to panic.
I've heard many parents of teenagers complaining that it's hard to get them off their football matches (5-a-side soccer is huge here, and any street can become an impromptu pitch).
Of course, depends on the kid, you couldn't take me off books and computers (when available) as a teenager.
(But when they are home, yeah, it's text text text.)
The main difference between US and Europe is the way the cities are setup. Much more walkable and urban centric in EU. Populations are much denser. It was a nice change of pace to be able to walk everywhere last year when I was in Italy.
Go to the park to practice said sports as a family. Take breaks to play on the play structures. Repeat as needed.
btw their entire middle school is like this. I hope this is not a sad preview of their adult lives...locked in their homes on screens.
Have you thought about a "spontaneous" roadtrip and weekend camping trip somewhere with no reception?
This at lower- to middle-middle class schools, not the rich ones. And we're deep in flyover country, not anywhere trendy.
My father in law never changed a nappy for any of his 3 children, and that was normal. It certainly isn't now.
Single motherhood rate in 1950: 5%
Single motherhood rate in 2010: 41%
There's no reason for an indirect proxy when the actual figure of interest is available:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192...
"During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent."
That means the percentage of families living together is declining.
Thanks for the link BTW. That data is way more relevant than the marriage statistics in this conversation.
Absolutely.
It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married, and it's difficult to afford childcare if mom is working and family cannot chip in, especially when you consider that many industries don't provide full-time jobs or sick time. It's cheaper for mom to stop working due to the child and bridge the gap with public assistance until the kids are around age 3, where there are more/cheaper daycare slots.
My wife worked for a utility with alot of blue collar guys -- easily 30% of the guys there had stay-at-home girlfriends with the kids. Not all of them were on public assistance, but people making $30-40k can't afford infant/toddler daycare.
Well, more accurately, it's more difficult if you are married to someone who had income because it affects the means test. Of course, for many of those you can't get them unless you identify and secure a child support order against the parent of your children, and then that child support is also treated as income in the means test for the program, so just staying unmarried (with it without cohabiting) doesn't actually solve the problem.
So you designate one household as the mooch household, and one as the worker household. The latter tends to be ineligible for all manner of otherwise useful benefits, working full-time at minimum wage, and benefits may even be curtailed working part-time. The other can collect the maximum available benefits.
This also leads to some strange behavior in states that have common-law marriages.
Depends on the country you are in. Here in Norway, quite definitely yes.
About 26% of couples are unmarried now.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/livin...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-pa...
This paper says it's 24%. Do you have a source for 41? That's too high.
That was precisely dragonwriter's point in the other thread (I can't nest there any further): your unmarried statistic was not particularly germane.
Further, your comment don't quite make sense in context. OP shows how the statistics in the article shows fathers have become more involved. You say they can't actually be more involved because they're not around?
I go out of my way to be more attentive to my children in the evening after work, and during the weekends. Their day to day lives are significantly more structured than my own upbringing.
Perhaps the rise in family time is due to this decades long mass messaging campaign around the developed world. And I don't think this is bad! Why? This social response is natural response to the rise in use of social media, entertainment and other electronic distractions.
Whether your 7 years old can get to the corner store and back after buying an ice cream there without encountering any dangers such as traffic.
Immediately thought that you could be jailed for that in some jurisdictions. Having said that, I think the number of people who let their kids free-range is decreasing everywhere unfortunately.
So free ranging is not decreasing in all countries, just a few.
In 10 minutes they can go to a wide variety of places, everything from IHOP to a dollar store. Albertsons is an 11 minute walk. Less if they run. More if they stop and play at the park on the way.
Not all of suburbia is big box malls off of freeways. There are a lot of little strip malls around as well. And you can choose a place for how walkable it is.
10 minutes of walking won't even get you out of my subdivision. Plop down a 15-minute radius on my map and there are literally zero places of business anywhere in it.
This is largely due to zoning. There is a strip of land zoned for local businesses a mere 10 minutes away, but unsurprisingly, no one has chosen to build anything on it.
You can't always prioritize walkability if you have a limit on your housing budget. My current place costs $11k/year, and the commuting to work by car isn't entirely horrible. But walking anywhere is really out of the question.
Getting to Mega-lo-mart would be a 45 minute walk, and involves going under the toll road overpass and crossing about 4 streets (so, a little farther than I'll want my kid going anytime soon).
I think the tide is turning back to free-range parenting.
Edited with my response to everyone depositing articles about the Meitivs:
Nobody “called CPS on” the Meitivs. Somebody called the polic because they saw the children wandering around a parking garage (not a park like in many of the news stories. See [1].) The police officer then called CPS several times wondering what to do with children before finally driving over to CPS when they were dragging their heels[2]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again.... [2] Not that I think CPS is great. As a teacher, it’s basically impossible to get CPS to do anything unless the parents are abusing the children right in front of you on school property. Part of that is CPS being overworked and underfunded/understaffed. Part of that is that is it still usually better to keep the kids with their parents instead of foster care. And part of it is CPS not having the resources to have more options besides arrest parents or do nothing (like offering social services to the parents). Also I would argue there is a difference between letting your children play in the neighborhood outside your house and just leaving your children at the park for hours. I have had students who haven been abandoned at the park with their younger siblings.
But it was still bizarre. I don't understand why the response (to the caller) isn't, "M'am, there's no violation of the law in your description of this event. Please keep this line open in case of actual emergencies."
Anyone can call CPS for just about anything, and having someone pick through your home and point out every little flaw, with the threat of taking your kids away is a real issue. Please don't downplay it, and don't downplay how shitty people can be to each other.
Seems like a passive-aggressive parental version of Swatting someone.
http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/silver-spring/md-free-range-...
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/neighbor-calls-cops... https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/22/canadian-mo...
Do you have any more "corrections" to make?
I live in the boonies and my kid gets to roam far and wide by himself. There's some risk involved, but it's never crossed my mind that I'm being negligent.
I think it would be more negligent to keep him indoors--not that it could qualify as criminally negligent in any sane universe.
Maybe I should call CPS on my mom. What's the statute of limitations.
Most of my life the rule was "be home by dinner" (6pm)
Also I stayed home alone and watched my little sister after about age 11. I had a single father.
My friends and I also played with explosives--we got into one buddy's father's black powder stash--but the only casualties were one guy's eyebrows. And his pride, once his mother noticed.
Even in large cities kids roam alone in their neighborhoods and parks. I live in SF, and regularly see kids under 10 skateboarding or riding their bikes on their own around my neighborhood. Now that I'm a parent, I also see toddlers running around fields in GG Park, barely within in earshot of their parents.
Odds are, if you don't see kids running around your neighborhood, it's either because you live in a neighborhood without many children (like most of SF), or you tend to be at work during the hours in which most children play.
a) hover over their children (in a playground for example) so as to be no more than 10-20 feet away from them at all times
b) eyeing any adults in the play area without a nearby child suspiciously
c) Occasionally chastising or otherwise harassing parents that don't do this, in the same way that nosy people chastise others over their actions.
Given the prevalence of stories and my own observations, I think you are wrong. I also think the quality of the institutions being talked about vary greatly depending on where you are. When I was in high school my friend had CPS called on her parents after a particularly nasty fight (her family was prone to loud fights) and it took them a couple weeks to convince CPS to get off their backs.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again...
[2] Not that I think CPS is great. As a teacher, it’s basically impossible to get CPS to do anything unless the parents are abusing the children right in front of you on school property. Part of that is CPS being overworked and underfunded/understaffed. Part of that is that is it still usually better to keep the kids with their parents instead of foster care. And part of it is CPS not having the resources to have more options besides arrest parents or do nothing (like offering social services to the parents). Also I would argue there is a difference between letting your children play in the neighborhood outside your house and just leaving your children at the park for hours. I have had students who haven been abandoned at the park with their younger siblings.
You're absolutely wrong and I know first hand of a couple of neighbors where exactly this has happened.
Just because you haven't experienced it first hand it doesn't mean you have proof positive that it never occurs.
I have not had CPS called on me. But I do have friends who dealt with that. In fact I know more people whose had CPS called on them than I do people who have been in car accidents. So it doesn't seem to be a super low probability event.
What also has me concerned is that my kids are heading towards puberty. Over 1/4 of all registered sex offenders committed their crime while minors. The single year of your life that you are most likely to become a registered sex offender is 14. It is massively more likely that they will have their lives destroyed that way than by an accident.
Most were before I was old enough to be driving.
5 of the vehicles were totaled, including the motorcycle.
Anyway I find it strange that some people have never been in one. I'm not sure I know anyone who hasn't.
A ford explorer in front of me on a 2-lane road going about 45mph turned into an apartment complex, then used their drive to do a big sweeping U turn back across my lane, and through a stop sign (for the driveway people turning onto the main road). I was 17 years old but I don't fault myself for not driving more defensively. The guy just turned into the apartments, when he swooped back out I swerved but it was all very quick. That's not something you're prepared to defend for until you've seen it happen, frankly.
The next one was very minor, but we had two left-hand turn lanes and we were approaching a traffic light. I was in the right-hand lane, with no cars directly in front of me. I had a red car to my left, and a black car in front of him. The light turned yellow, and the black car was going to stop. The red car swerved quickly into my lane to go around the black car, and he clipped the front of my car. It knocked off a light cover, but otherwise no real damage. He ran the light and did not stop. There was no time to react, he literally yanked his wheel over, and I could not swerve right anyway, as there were vehicles there.
On the motorcycle, I was driving on a two-lane road behind a large vehicle, I think it was an SUV. Someone was waiting to turn left in the opposite lane (so they wanted to turn across our lane). There were many cars behind me as well. The person didn't see me and turned after the SUV passed. They stopped halfway through the turn, by which time I had already put down the bike while slamming on the brakes. The bike hit the car and totaled, and I slid down my lane with virtually no injuries. I was fairly well equipped so I just had a couple of very minor scrapes. She had no insurance. This accident was most avoidable in theory. Perhaps I could have positioned myself better, and she might have seen me. But probably not. I could not have swerved around her, though, unless I anticipated her stopping halfway. If she didn't stop halfway, and I swerved right, I would have gone through her passenger window. If I swerved left, it was a head-on collision.
During all of the other accidents, I was not the driver.
We (rational Americans) are as perplexed as you are how that could possibly qualify.
Yes, CPS in one state did something ambiguous and alarming to self-proclaimed "free range" parents.
No, you probably don't have the full story that a guy who had never seen the children before was concerned about their safety in that part of town, he decided to call 911 instead of talking to the kids and coming off as a creep.
Yes, that one town's police department did get the CPS' attention, and the CPS did an investigation and found something arbitrary which is rightfully concerning.
No, this isn't indicative of the entire US culture or widespread neighborly paranoia about children walking unattended.
No, I don't think that is the case most (any?) place. :(
I'm also afraid to look at the statistics, as I fear I'll see that this is another slant in class/race standings. :(
I live in a small gated community, in among other ungated neighborhoods. I see kids playing around my neighborhood, but never leaving it on their own. I hear grumbling from some of my neighbors even about that.