Let Kids Outdoors
Crime is Down, But Parents Shelter Their Children As If There’s a Child Predator On Every Corner.
One sunny afternoon as our children played nearby, I asked a neighbor at what age she would allow her son to bicycle around the block by himself.
“I don’t think I would ever do that,” she replied. “The world is a very different place now than it was when we were growing up.”
Did she really think the number of child molesters and kidnappers in the world had increased in the last 20 or 30 years, I asked? “Oh, yes, I think it is increasing. Because of the Internet.”
At a PTA meeting, during a discussion of traffic problems around the school campus, I asked what we could do to encourage families to walk or bike to school. Other parents looked at me as if I’d suggested we stuff the children into barrels and roll them into the nearest active volcano. One teacher looked at me in shock. “I wouldn’t let my children walk to school alone … would you?”
“Haven’t you heard about all of the predators in this area?” asked a father.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “I think this is a pretty safe neighborhood.”
“You’d be surprised,” he replied, lowering his eyebrows. “You should read the Megan’s Law website.” He continued: “You know how to solve the traffic problem around this school? Get rid of all the predators. Then you won’t have any more traffic.”
Huh?
Our hyper-anxiety about the safety of children is creating a society in which any outdoor activity that doesn’t take place under the supervision of a coach or a “psychomotor activities” mandate from the state is too risky to attempt.
An example: My son’s school has a written rule that students in grades K-4 may not ride their bicycles to school. My son and I cheerfully ignore this restriction; I think school rules belong on campus, not off. As we ride together each day, I remember the Huffy Sweet ‘n’ Sassy I rode to school when I was a kid. Hot pink, with a flowered wicker basket, it stood out among the other bikes parked in the crowded racks, its tall orange safety flag flapping in the breeze.
Now, my son’s bike stands alone, always the sole occupant of the school’s tucked-in-a-faraway-corner bike rack. When we arrive, other kids look at us in amazement and ask questions like “Why do you ride a bike?” and “Don’t you have a car?”
Although statistics show that rates of child abduction and sexual abuse have marched steadily downward since the early 1990s, fear of these crimes is at an all-time high. Even the panic-inducing Megan’s Law website says stranger abduction is rare and that 90% of child sexual-abuse cases are committed by someone known to the child. Yet we still suffer a crucial disconnect between perception of crime and its statistical reality. A child is almost as likely to be struck by lightning as kidnapped by a stranger, but it’s not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors watching television instead of out on the sidewalk skipping rope.
And when a child is parked on the living room floor, he or she may be safe, but is safety the sole objective of parenting? The ultimate goal is independence, and independence is best fostered by handing it out a little at a time, not by withholding it in a trembling fist that remains clenched until it’s time to move into the dorms.
Meanwhile, as rates of child abduction and abuse move down, rates of Type II diabetes, hypertension and other obesity-related ailments in children move up. That means not all the candy is coming from strangers. Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child may become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country’s 58 million overweight adults?
In 1972, 87% of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13% of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a significant parallel, before 1980, only 5% of children were obese; today that figure has tripled, says the CDC.
The next generation of grandparents won’t even need to harangue their progeny with tales of walking seven miles to school in the snow; it’ll be impressive enough to say that they walked at all. My neighbor was right — the world is a very different place.
L.J. Williamson (ljwilliamson.com) is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
© 2007 The Los Angeles Times
Ironically I find this 6-o’clock news-induced fearfulness seems to increase the further out into the outer suburbs one goes. When I moved to an older, lower-middle class, rust-belt, city neighborhood, one of the most dramatic change was the sound of unsupervised children in the streets - every day my street looks like a scene from the 1930’s little rascals movies. Annoyingly noisy at times with the occasional broken window brom a stray ball, but healthy. I never heard of a single account of any probelms.
The fear and paranoia of these suburbanites is a serious problem that gets little attention. I laugh out loud at fearfulness some of them exhibit when they come into even the safest parts of the city - all they have to see is just one poor black guy on the sidewalk and they visibly tremble as they hurry to get back in their SUV.
In the direction American society is going today we will have eliminated childhood altogether in a few more generations. Our children at that time will grow up inside hi-tech homes, schools, and buildings and venture outdoors only in groups. We are destroying their childhood when we try to protect our children against an imaginary threat. Sure there are bad people out there, but forbidding a child to ride a bicycle to school is child abuse. You aren’t protecting that child, you are killing the natural enthusiasm he needs grow up.
Hoa Binh
My children are not unsupervised outside because of traffic. Even in ubersuburbia, we have high rates of car-bike and car-pedestrian accidents. Cars race down our 25MPH street at 45 or 50. Somedays, it’s tricky for me to safely walk 8 houses down to collect the mail. More than once, a cell-phone wielding driver has crashed her minivan up on the sidewalk where we were rollerblading. We’ve had to push our children off of sidewalks and onto the grass when near the corner of our neighborhood street where trucks routinely come up on the curb.
I don’t think my kids would far well with a car, let alone SUV-bus-tank-like vehicle. Neither would I. I live in a town chuck full of beautiful bike trails. And we have to drive our car to get to any of them. This is an extremely bike hostile and pedestrian hostile town — Fort Collins. I would guess that even some of the pedaphiles and sex criminals have been run down.
Ha, ha. That explains it. I don’t have children but lived next to a school in Arlington Heights, Mass. It isn’t exactly a high-crime area. When school got out and I was working from home I was amazed at all the SUV’s which parked on my quiet street causing a small traffic jam and some of which sat for a half hour sometimes with the engine running. I wondered why all the kids lived so far from the school that they couldn’t walk but maybe they did live close enough.
The one new thing which makes me want to laugh is this “play date” thing. And then there are all these parents who cover electrical outlets, have devices to monitor sounds in other rooms, and yes - would rather have their kids get fat and stupid mesmerized by the TV or some computer game.
It’s true that most kids that are kidnapped happen to be kidnapped by someone known to the family. As stated in another post, rates of child abduction have been falling in the past 15 to 20 years.
I could write on about my experiences as a child (1959), but I’ll just say I had a wonderful childhood. Everyday was an adventure. Our favorite thing was hopping trains and riding them out of town to go swimming in a lake.
There’s far too much fear in our lives today. Fear of being ugly, fear of being fat, fear of being friendless, fear of not dressing “cool”, fear of not measuring up to whatever it is we’re supposed to measure up to this week.
I made some of my best friends by first getting into a fist fight. Today, it’s far easier to pull out a gun and settle a dispute.
I do feel that TV has a lot of blame for this state we are in, but I also blame overprotective parents. We can’t watch - nor should we watch - our children all the time. Let them learn through play what they can’t learn in school. I mean, if we’ve survived as a civilization these past 10,000 years or so, it certainly hasn’t been because children were potected against every imaginable danger.
And you wonder why there is a childhood obesity problem. The parents can at least walk to school to pick up their kids. This is just another disadvantage of being so dependant on oil.
I think parents are fearful for their children more now than then because of tv. We have “America’s Most Wanted”, Cold Case Files, and others that teach us to be fearful. We learn about the kidnappings that happen all over this nation, not just in our hometown. It seems there are more because we hear about more. The graphics are there for us to remember, described in vivid detail. We didn’t get that back then. Also, we didn’t have the fast food joints that make it so fast, cheap and easy for the parents to feed the kids after work. Both parents work now. So there is a lot that contributes to our kids being overly protected, fat and lazy.
I remember as a child taking long expeditions, either alone or with other kids. The sad thing is that even if you don’t ascribe to sequestering kids within dark presidential SUV caravans, picked up from school like they’re Dick Cheney, you become programmed and accustomed to expecting to see that treatment. For example, when was the last time you saw 8 year old kids walking alone on the sidewalk toward a destination? I’m guessing 20 years ago. And when you do, your first thought is “where is their supervision”. Thus does conscience make cowards of us all.
Yes. That’s the way it was. Steve, you’ve just reminded me of so much - especially the newspaper routes in the morning and another in the afternoon. And we got smacked around by the nuns from time to time, but more often than not, we deserved it.
I, like yourself, could go on and on about the advwntures we had as children. It was a wonderful time. I doubt it will ever return.
teastaigh March 29th, 2007 7:08 pm
“My children are not unsupervised outside because of traffic. Even in ubersuburbia, we have high rates of car-bike and car-pedestrian accidents.”
You put your finger on the problem, teastaigh. Statistically speaking a child in the suburbs is more likely to be killed by a car than a child in the inner-city is to be killed by crime.
To Steve O. I’m of similar age and I too remember those days fondly. But I think of all the incredibly stupid things we did as kids completely unsupervised, and wonder if nowadays our parents would be charged with dependent neglect.
Well I’m just 50, and as a kid we went everywhere unsupervised, catching frogs and fishing in the summer ans sledding, skating and evading the greenkepers at the local private golf course in winter. We were running around like this, our faithful dog hobo tagging along, starting at no more than six years of age. Once we learned to ride bicycles, we went on long rides halfway across the then not yet entirely suburbanized, (but at the time also bike-trail free, Fairfax County, VA. There were incidents, one kid in my school did get killed by dump-truck while riding his bicycle on a busy highway I wouldn’t have ever ridden on myself. As far as “predators”, there once was was a rumor of a “flasher” (you know the trench coat and all that) exposing himself to girls along a path in the woods between the nighborhoods. But, this elecited as much humor as alarm, - as we understood in those days ther was little danger of physical harm from such nuts.
I later moved to the quaint, old-fashoned, unfashonable (and somewhat poor), city of Pittsburgh which even today, is full of dreadfully irresponsible parents who let their preteen kids run unsupervised and even ride the bus unsupervised to parks, pools and Kennywood Amusement Park - the transit authority even offered special kids passes for a couple summers.
But, there are also pepole trapped by poverty in some rough neighborhoods, and the poor black (and a good share of white) parents very justifiably worry themselves over the substandard schools and their kids getting involved in the gangs and drugs.
So, I find this paranoia among the privleged, white, upper middle class in the outer suburbs to be at once amazing and disgusting. I think the heart of the matter was explained in that south-park style cartoon segement in Machael Moores’ “Bowling for Columbine” - where somehow, deep inside, white Americans are still fearing a revolt of the slaves and indians, and big business is more than willing to stoke their fears to increase their sales of big SUV’s, big houses with ADT security systems in far flung exurbs (why does the density of these “protected by ADT” signs INCREASE as one goes outward into the countryside???), and of course, guns.
I recently attended a presentation about Gen X parents and their children entering college. The presenter talked about the kids of boomers being very independent because having kids was not the thing to do, to the point where kids were demonized in films. Then there was an about face with mini-vans, child safety this and that, kids portrayed as cozy cuddley. Between the 2 extremes, us lucky boomers had it best. Somehow most of us even survived without seatbelts, our mothers smoked and drank, and we were allowed to roam our neighborhoods-be they farm fields, woods, or city streets, and it was all great fun. I really feel bad for kids today.
How do you stop responding to fear and learn to use your head? All statistics for many years point to the greatest danger to children being family members and trusted family associates. My children are more likely to get hit by lightning then abducted. All this fear is simply good marketing and we can’t seem to shake ourselves out of its “spell”.
The notion that children are “safe” in front of the TV is absurd. More damage is done to children by the commercialism and violence on television than is ever likely to happen to them outdoors.
One of the saddest things to see is a child sitting outside on a beautiful day with his face glued to a gameboy. Many kids literally don’t know how to play outdoors these days; they just sit and say “there’s nothing to do!!!”.
It is also very interesting to note the coincidence of this parental fear with the increase in childhood obesity. Of course the kids are getting fatter - we make them stay inside, sit in front of the TV or computer, and stuff them with Cheetos and Mountain Dew.
I don’t think kids can play outside anymore because the lawn company has usually just been by to make sure the outside is too toxic for children and pets so you have to stay inside and play video games.
All y’all have said it so well upthread; throw in a fearless brother, acres of woods, fields, hills and the mill pond–I wouldn’t trade the lessons or the memories of my first fifteen years. The BB shot to the sternum scared me away from guns before I turned ten, and still now at near fifty.
Oh, the “Play Date” thing is awful. I’m forty and have a two year old son. We live on a farm in a rural community. No one ever uses the park in “town” or permits children to play outdoors (even out here in “the country”). Instead, they (I swear, I’m not making this up) plan play dates at the food court of the mall an hour away. I did that once, and after being overwhelmed by a Dantesque vision of Hell, gave up on my son having any friends. He does have a thirteen year old poodle that sneers at him when he tries to play fetch-but at least they play outdoors together.
We get all the fear-mongering about predators around every corner as well. We’re all supposed to be on the lookout for crazed meth addicts as well. If anyone needs me, I’ll be cowering beneath my bed.