Useless Conversation

[Paelos]

Be Back for Dinner. Don't make me have to come find you.

Those were words from my parents regularly as a child.

[HaemishM]

Free range children is perhaps one of the dumbest phrases I've ever heard. I grew up in the country - our nearest neighbor was a mile down the road and the nearest town was over 5 miles away. There wasn't a day as a child where I didn't roam far from my parents' view, through woods thick enough to hide in. It was called being a kid.

[Rasix]

Are there any other childless that would like to weigh in?  

[Teleku]

Are there any other childless that would like to weigh in?   

Children are dicks.

[Polysorbate80]

Are there any other childless that would like to weigh in?  

In the not-at-all-helpful department:

My wife would shit her knickers at the thought of the kids running around by themselves.  I, on the other hand, was appalled that after twice walking from her kindergarten to my office (distance: two blocks? a little more?), my daughter still wasn't able to figure out and walk the route by herself.

Since I'm the man I of course lost the argument, so I will never get to tell my children "Look out for scary policemen who try to get you into their cars. "

[Engels]

What I don't get is why Gen X parents who were children of Greatest Gen/Early boomers are so helicoptery. God knows my parents were considered 'overprotective' by the day's standards yet I still got to walk home 1 hour from school, play in dirty stream beds, roam woods, get lost on the bike, etc. What happened?

[Trippy]

News.

[Rasix]

Are there any other childless that would like to weigh in?  

In the not-at-all-helpful department:

My wife would shit her knickers at the thought of the kids running around by themselves.  I, on the other hand, was appalled that after twice walking from her kindergarten to my office (distance: two blocks? a little more?), my daughter still wasn't able to figure out and walk the route by herself.

Since I'm the man I of course lost the argument, so I will never get to tell my children "Look out for scary policemen who try to get you into their cars. "

Yah, I just lost a ridiculous argument myself.  Apparently my parents aren't going to be able to see my son play basketball before my mom's surgery because my wife says it's inconvenient.  And if they make it less inconvenient (just leave after the game), it's "hard on our son".  If they go even further it's "I said no".  It's awesome, I'm going to be hated by everyone for a few weeks here.

What I don't get is why Gen X parents who were children of Greatest Gen/Early boomers are so helicoptery. God knows my parents were considered 'overprotective' by the day's standards yet I still got to walk home 1 hour from school, play in dirty stream beds, roam woods, get lost on the bike, etc. What happened?

Heh, I was allowed to just play on our acre of desert for playtime with no other guidance than be in before (lunch/dark).  However, there were only like 5 houses on the hill we lived on, and we knew everyone.  It was pretty much a self contained area and we were not allowed to go down the hill.  

Where we live now? Too densely populated, too much traffic, and too many people in and out of the rentals.  And he's 5. My memory of true autonomy in a suburban environment (we moved) didn't really start until I was around 12, which seems reasonable.

[Merusk]

News.

This And the over scheduling / need to compete for "best parent ever" that leads to that Overscheduling.

Hell, I only just met one of my sons best friends' parents last weekend.  The dad expressed his great it was my son walked over to their place regularly to see if the kid could play. As if it was an unusual or weird thing.  I didn't realize things were so weird these days until that moment.

It also made me realize why I never saw the neighbor kids outdoors. Mom doesn't like being outside and they are only allowed out when she is.  Tragic as we have a 3 acre no build wooded area behind our houses and her kids are 5 through 12.

[Furiously]

Because you will be charged with neglect if you try to raise your kid as your parents raised you. Which I think is kinda bullshit.

[Triax]

What I don't get is why Gen X parents who were children of Greatest Gen/Early boomers are so helicoptery. God knows my parents were considered 'overprotective' by the day's standards yet I still got to walk home 1 hour from school, play in dirty stream beds, roam woods, get lost on the bike, etc. What happened?

But, but...the world is a scary place...

[Sky]

When I was a kid we were told to get the hell out of the house after school until dinner time. This modern child fetish era amuses me.

Buy your kid a bike and shut the fuck up.

Also, enjoy their adulthood spent needing a mommy and daddy to function.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Are there any other childless that would like to weigh in?  

Sometimes an outside perspective is needed. 

[Merusk]

When I was a kid we were told to get the hell out of the house after school until dinner time. This modern child fetish era amuses me.

Buy your kid a bike and shut the fuck up.

Also, enjoy their adulthood spent needing a mommy and daddy to function.

Without a doubt.  Hell, that's already happening with parents trying to go on their kid's job interviews, or setting up & running the kid to the interview.

I'm happy enough for it, though. Just makes my spawn that much more capable and gives them an advantage.  Keep shitting-up your kids, America, my gene pool thanks you! 

[Khaldun]

It's an interesting puzzle. I also was allowed to just wander all over the place. There was a creek that ran by our house all the way to the ocean, I used to get home from school in sixth grade and tell my mom I was going to go for a hike all the way down to the ocean and back, probably about a 2.5 mile loop with some elevation, with winos and druggies usually hanging out in the culvert that the creek went into before hitting the beach, and some waterfalls and shit to climb up and down. No problemo, and my mom was a perfectly attentive, responsible, involved-in-her-family person. Same when we moved up into the Santa Monica mountains when I was in seventh grade--I'd grab the machete from the garage and clear brush from our backyard up an arroyo above our house until I'd built our own private trail up the canyon to the top of the foothill behind the house. Past rattlesnake dens, up rockfalls, etc.--my dad came along on weekends and he was pretty satisfied that I knew what I was doing, so keep at it, son.

My daughter doesn't really do that kind of wandering around. I don't forbid it. And we're really careful to avoid overscheduling, we don't helicopter like many other folks we see in her school, etc. But even though I don't mind the thought of her just walking around the neighborhood or going on her own somewhere, it doesn't happen. So why?

1) Our neighborhoods just aren't set up like the ones I wandered around in SoCal. We're suburban, but a lot of the streets don't have shoulders and they do have a lot of traffic. Plus at least half the year it's not so much fun to wander around the woods or parks here. August sucks and so does February, usually.
 
2) Media for kids is just plain better, especially games and other computer stuff. I don't know that I would have been out and about so much if there had been games and even kidvid like what she's got access to. I read like a motherfucker all the time but even that was often because I walked to the local library and read there.

3) There's just less daylight between adult life and kid life, which is both good and bad. I talk pretty frankly around my daughter about politics, about the world, about the stories we've read, etc. She's seen way more in media than I ever did--I wasn't particularly sheltered, my parents were secular and worldly, they both had college educations, but I can remember that it was a big fucking deal to see an R-rated movie (Blazing Saddles was the first I saw, Alien was about three years later, maybe one or two others in there). Most of the stuff I really liked like comics or science fiction was really not at all familiar to my folks, whereas my daughter has grown up with a house full of comics, SF novels, animation, etc. and likes it as much as I do. When there's less of a sense of separation between adults and kids, the kids feel less of a need to go off on their own.

4) We all think about risk in some ways that are objectively stupid but emotionally powerful. All you need to hear is one story of a failure to protect a kid to lock that into your emotional hindbrain. I distantly knew a couple through an online community a bit like this one some years ago where they were staying at a friend's house that had a pool and their five-year old decided in the middle of the night to go for a swim without telling anyone & drowned. Can't forget that when you hear it, and same for any story of kids being kidnapped, run down, whatever. Doesn't matter if you know how unlikely it is--if it feels like you could have stopped something like it, you have it haunting your awareness. I think my parents and their parents mostly didn't hear those stories because the media wasn't 24/7 now.

5) When I think about my own experience, I have to admit that there were some close calls that I just brushed off at the time. There was a guy I knew in my neighborhood when I was in sixth grade who kept telling me that I should come visit this house where there was this really cool adult that he knew, he had some beers he would give us and all that. I almost went over there one day and something sort of said, "Um, maybe not." I actually asked my mom if I could go over there and she was like FUCK NO which was unusually intense for her. But of course she was right--the guy was an early-twenties dealer and pedophile living in the house that his deceased mom had left him and got arrested eventually. A bunch of us found a tree in the kids' park where some creepy old dude stored his porn, we used to see him sometimes going to the tree and then going into the woods. The winos in the culvert were sometimes pretty damn menacing when I went on my hikes. There was another kid about three blocks down that I knew a bit who got arrested when he was in high school because he was kidnapping cats and torturing them. Some other teenager came through the neighborhood on a skateboard one day and exposed himself to every little girl he saw, including my younger sister who was just hanging out on our front lawn. Etc.--I think that's another piece of it, most of us who grew up in suburbia learned eventually, accumulatively, that it was not at ALL the kind of blandly white middle-class normal that fifties popular culture usually portrayed it as being. So when you have some sense that there's hidden danger around you because of what you know from your own experience, even if nothing really terrible happened, you have a hard time just relaxing and not worrying about your own kid.

[Xanthippe]

What I don't get is why Gen X parents who were children of Greatest Gen/Early boomers are so helicoptery. God knows my parents were considered 'overprotective' by the day's standards yet I still got to walk home 1 hour from school, play in dirty stream beds, roam woods, get lost on the bike, etc. What happened?

I'm a Boomer who had kids late. I fall on the helicoptery side of things. Here's why.

When I was a kid, I had great freedom and little supervision. This was both good, and bad. When parents don't get home from work until past 8, nobody is there to drive one to lessons, help with homework, or talk to, except siblings, who may or may not be making good choices. My parents did the best they could, but did not consider putting children front and center as do many parents today. They had kids younger, and had their own issues they were working out.

I made some not great choices, myself, although I did benefit from seeing the fallout of my siblings' bad choices.

Also, I had my share of run-ins with pervs as a kid- from gropers to exposers to peepers (fortuntely not worse, but many of my friends did not fare so well).

Fast forward to now (or rather 10 years ago, since my kids are now high school/college). The town I live in has an awful lot of broken people wandering about (due to being a place with a reputation to be good for homeless/mentally ill/addicted) - when I was a kid, a lot of these folks were in locked mental facilities. Not a family friendly town, particularly, but good for college students and broken people. High crime rates for theft/rape.

I wish I'd settled someplace more family friendly before I started having kids. Husband didn't want to move when I did, so here we still are.

Having said all that, I think it's absolutely ridiculous what happened to that family in MD. (Kids picked up by CPS because mom and dad let them play in a park a few blocks from home without supervision). I would not make the choices those parents did, but I don't think the state ought to step in, either.

[Xanthippe]

This And the over scheduling / need to compete for "best parent ever" that leads to that Overscheduling.

Hell, I only just met one of my sons best friends' parents last weekend.  The dad expressed his great it was my son walked over to their place regularly to see if the kid could play. As if it was an unusual or weird thing.  I didn't realize things were so weird these days until that moment.

It also made me realize why I never saw the neighbor kids outdoors. Mom doesn't like being outside and they are only allowed out when she is.  Tragic as we have a 3 acre no build wooded area behind our houses and her kids are 5 through 12.

If people aren't living in or wandering through those woods, then why doesn't she let them go outside without her?

(On further reflection, I wonder if maybe she had some sort of trauma when she was a kid.)

[Lantyssa]

The park story was silly.

I lived on a court with a dozen houses in a smallish neighborhood.  We had fairly sizable woods next to this that I wandered around unsupervised all the time.  I walked to school since kindergarten.  I walked to friends' houses.  Basically I roamed up to 10 blocks from my house on a regular basis, and it wasn't unknown for me to wander further.  I think intermediate school was just under three miles and I'd do that occasionally, too.

(I only walked.  Bikes and I didn't get along, else my radius of wandering would have been a lot further.)

[Morat20]

Wahoo! Turns out the root cause of ALL THE DASHBOARD LIGHTS coming on in my car? Recall issue.

Sure, I had to take the day off and should have done it months ago, but it beats thousands of dollars.

(Seriously, I have seen cars after wrecks that did not have that many "Something is wrong" lights blaring at once. I saw a LOT of dollar signs coming out of my bank at that one).

[Engels]

Thanks Khaldun, Xanthippe and others for your detailed responses. So, it seems that there are a few factors at play, the biggest one being that our parents were 'ignorant' about the dangers out there, and didn't have 24/7 media scaring the pants off of us about the tragedies that happen to children. I'm sure kids have always drowned in pools daily, but back in the day there just wasn't a way to hear that story.

The second and to me more interesting factor seems to be that our suburban neighborhoods are just not pedestrian friendly. No sidewalks, heavy traffic arterials, lack of natural spaces to roam in without fear of whackos, etc. It makes me wonder if the great mental health purge of the 80s, where tons of mentally ill people were kicked out of facilities and into the streets has exacerbated things, along with our glorious 'war on drugs' that seems to have perpetuated public violence.

[Merusk]

The thing is our parents were ignorant and we're hyper-aware of ONLY the dangers.  All the crimes & dangers parents freak about? They're at the lowest they've ever been and keep dropping, AND if your kid is going to be molested its much more likely to be your brother, sister or close family friend than a stranger.  Kidnapping? Again, close relative or estranged mother/ father will happen far more frequently than a stranger. 

Guess we should stop having family get-togethers, eh? They're DANGEROUS.

I dunno what Kaldun's on about with sidewalks/ etc. All the ones I've worked on and lived in have had sidewalks. The exceptions I've run in to were "high end" places where walking was impractical because the front lot line was 200' or better or on-your-lot builds where the closest house was a farm away.

If people aren't living in or wandering through those woods, then why doesn't she let them go outside without her?

(On further reflection, I wonder if maybe she had some sort of trauma when she was a kid.)

I have no idea. It's a great space for the kids to play around in. My son and two other boys built a snow fort back there this winter, I imagine they'll do something similar this year.

Neighbor & husband won't engage in conversation and barely even wave back when I'm out mowing the lawn or tending the bushes and she's mother-henning the kids. They're both teachers and I rarely see them outside, but when I do it's all rather odd with each parent trading off staying within 20 feet of the kids at all times. They're younger than me by at least 5 years so I chalk it up to fear.

They did warn me "there's poison ivy back there, stay out it's a mess" when we moved in but it's not "overgrown" like they claimed.  Its a few vines right at the treeline that were easily handled this year.  Only my wife caught it last year when she foolishly chased a cat that got outside, the son was unaffected.  (protip: don't chase cats into brush. Walk around)

[Rasix]

Guess we should stop having family get-togethers, eh? They're DANGEROUS.

Man, there's about a handful of relatives I won't let my son anywhere near and some that cannot be unsupervised around him.  Fucked up drug addicts, ex-drug addicts, and one pedo.  YAY.

New house should be a better environment as he grows up.  No kids in the immediate area but two very large subdivisions near by in walking/biking distance with no major arterial streets to traverse.  Less rentals and Marana hillbillies as well.

[Xanthippe]

The thing is our parents were ignorant and we're hyper-aware of ONLY the dangers.  All the crimes & dangers parents freak about? They're at the lowest they've ever been and keep dropping, AND if your kid is going to be molested its much more likely to be your brother, sister or close family friend than a stranger.  Kidnapping? Again, close relative or estranged mother/ father will happen far more frequently than a stranger.  

This is generally true, and it tends to happen in some families a lot, sadly.

However, I have had far too many experiences in my town with crazies to want to subject my daughter (even now at 16) to them. When she was 12, she had 3 (!) bad experiences in 6 months while walking our dog down our street. That made her never want to go walk the dog alone again.

It sometimes seems as though we live in an open air mental asylum. A lot of businesses hire security guards, as in third world countries. Our parks are so overrun right now that our city hires rangers to deal with the problems. (It's really not fun to go to the park and have some weirdo use the playground as a urinal.)

(Before we had kids, there were random mostly harmless people, but in the past few years we are overrun. Other communities are tightening up, so they come here. It sucks to have that reputation.)

[Edited to add: I have nothing against people with mental issues, provided they can still stay within the boundaries of civil society. If they can't, though, they need to be where they can behave themselves, and not just running around loose inflicting themselves on everyone.]

[Trippy]

(It's really not fun to go to the park and have some weirdo use the playground as a urinal.)

Hey it's better than them just doing it in the streets like in San Francisco

[Chimpy]

So I am riding the bus home from work and some college girl is talking on her cellphone behind me botching about some class and says "I am tired about hearing about the stupid Berlin wall, it was 25 years ago get over it already."

Feeling very   right now.

[Merusk]

Should have told her, "So was your birthday. Get over yourself."

Then rocked the shades and screamed "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH"

[Furiously]

Pedophile databases were also not on the Internet when I was a kid. I'm sure my parents wouldn't have let me out if they were.

[Samwise]

Should have told her, "So was your birthday. Get over yourself."

Then rocked the shades and screamed "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH"

Product idea: sunglasses with tiny embedded chip that detects when you put them on your face and plays that YEEEAAAAHHHHHH.

[Rendakor]

Should have told her, "So was your birthday. Get over yourself."

Then rocked the shades and screamed "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH"

Product idea: sunglasses with tiny embedded chip that detects when you put them on your face and plays that YEEEAAAAHHHHHH.

https://www.kickstarter.com/start?ref=learn_top

[Viin]

Heck, I'll do that if you don't!

[Samwise]

Cut me in for 5% and it's yours.   

[Rasix]

Sorry, just submitted the patent paperwork for this at work.   TROLOLOLO

[Hawkbit]

I just finished my final college assignment.

Jesus, let there be bourbon.

[Nebu]

I just finished my final college assignment.

Jesus, let there be bourbon.

Savor this moment.  As bad as college is, working is 100x worse.

[Abagadro]

Ya, congrats. Start the clock on when you will be fed up and want to go back.