Free-Range Parenting; Criminalization of Parenthood, vs. Overprotection of Children?
When cleaning out some old newspapers I came across this book review, entitled The Criminalization of Parenthood
, about the book Small Animals. The premise of the review and the book is that we criminalize any parenting that doesn't infantilize growing children. On researching the subject further, I came upon this article, The Parent Trap
. An excerpt from The Parent Trap:
Starting when I was about 10, I rode my Raleigh three-speed bike in suburban New York to pickup baseball games with other 10 year olds. No parents watching the game. If someone got hit in the mouth with a ball, someone would round up help. And without the help of a cell-phone, not a widely used technology in 1967.
Not that there wasn't some risk. On December 2, 1967 I was playing ice hockey with my friends. I fell through the ice. My friend's 15 year old brother (maybe 16) and his friend found a greens' rope on the golf course. One of them tied a rope around his waste and the other guided from the shore, pulling both the rescuer and myself from the icy drink. I survived and learned a lot about being careful.
Fast forward four years, when I was 14. I fought constantly with my parents, wanting to bike myself to night events at the high school, a bit more than six miles away. Ultimately I won this arguments.
Fast forward again, to 2010. My then-14 year old son was one of the few of his peers that bicycled anyway, or rode the NYC subways or commuter rails on his own. I believe we need to loosen up a lot on how we raise our children, and convince them to do things for themselves.
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And it wasn't just teens. Remember I was 10 when I had a bicycle range of a bit over two miles. The thought was that children could be taught to look both way before crossing a street. Children could be taught to not talk to strangers or get into peoples' vehicles. Interestingly though, hitchhiking was common but that was generally a fourteen and up activity.
When I have this discussion with parents of younger children these days they say "well, that was a different era." Actually crime is down from those times. The problem is that with the ability to report unsupervised child play to "Child Protective Services" the risks to parents are far greater than the slight risk of actual harm coming to the child. The government could take away the child, literally.
Some changes don't make sense. The sheltering of children is one of them.
, about the book Small Animals. The premise of the review and the book is that we criminalize any parenting that doesn't infantilize growing children. On researching the subject further, I came upon this article, The Parent Trap
. An excerpt from The Parent Trap:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ross Douhat, NY Times
Or — arriving at this week’s high-profile story — like Debra Harrell, an African-American single mother in Georgia, who let her 9-year-old daughter play in a nearby park while she worked a shift at McDonald’s, and who ended up shamed on local news and jailed.
Some of these cases have been reported, but some are first-person accounts, and in some the conduct of neighbors and the police and social workers may be more defensible than the anecdote suggests.
But the pattern — a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko — still looks slightly nightmarish, and there are forces at work here that we should recognize, name and resist.
Some of these cases have been reported, but some are first-person accounts, and in some the conduct of neighbors and the police and social workers may be more defensible than the anecdote suggests.
But the pattern — a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko — still looks slightly nightmarish, and there are forces at work here that we should recognize, name and resist.
Not that there wasn't some risk. On December 2, 1967 I was playing ice hockey with my friends. I fell through the ice. My friend's 15 year old brother (maybe 16) and his friend found a greens' rope on the golf course. One of them tied a rope around his waste and the other guided from the shore, pulling both the rescuer and myself from the icy drink. I survived and learned a lot about being careful.
Fast forward four years, when I was 14. I fought constantly with my parents, wanting to bike myself to night events at the high school, a bit more than six miles away. Ultimately I won this arguments.
Fast forward again, to 2010. My then-14 year old son was one of the few of his peers that bicycled anyway, or rode the NYC subways or commuter rails on his own. I believe we need to loosen up a lot on how we raise our children, and convince them to do things for themselves.
================================================== ========
And it wasn't just teens. Remember I was 10 when I had a bicycle range of a bit over two miles. The thought was that children could be taught to look both way before crossing a street. Children could be taught to not talk to strangers or get into peoples' vehicles. Interestingly though, hitchhiking was common but that was generally a fourteen and up activity.
When I have this discussion with parents of younger children these days they say "well, that was a different era." Actually crime is down from those times. The problem is that with the ability to report unsupervised child play to "Child Protective Services" the risks to parents are far greater than the slight risk of actual harm coming to the child. The government could take away the child, literally.
Some changes don't make sense. The sheltering of children is one of them.
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