Last month, the two [parents] were found responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect for allowing their kids, 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora, to walk home alone in December. …
The kids had been playing at a park about a mile away and the Meitivs, both scientists, encouraged them to walk home on their own as a lesson in self-reliance.
Oooh. A mile. I used to spend all day wandering around by myself. I went to the downtown YMCA in Vancouver, far more than a mile away, by myself. My school was about a mile away and I walked there and home by myself. I went out and played street hockey and my parents had no idea where I was; it was usually at least half a mile away.
It’s true that the world has changed, mind you: Stranger-crime afflicting children is way down. This might be because of all the helicopter parenting, I grant you, but there’s no credible argument that America or Canada is now more dangerous for children than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
In fact, if something bad is going to happen to your child, a few over-reported cases aside, it will almost certainly be done to them by a family member, a friend of the family, or another trusted adult. The people who are goddamn scary to children, dangerous to children, are the people you trust, not strangers.
Meanwhile, absent unsupervised playtime, absent learning how to handle themselves around strangers, the children don’t properly develop independence or creativity. (Measures of creativity are now in multi-generational decline, coinciding with the rise of helicopter parenting.)
Keeping children so safe they never learn how to be independent, creative adults who are able to take care of themselves is no favor to them. It’s an indulgence in fear. I was going to school by myself in grade two. I was walking Calcutta slums by myself in my early teens. I was traveling by myself in my teens as well.
And yeah, the bad things that happened to me, I can tell you, all happened at the hands of trusted adults and the bad things I suffered at the hands of other children ALL happened at school, supposedly a supervised place.
Binding children hand and foot doesn’t teach them safety, it teaches them fear and dependence.
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