Parkinson told me that her son—who competently walked the security guard back to their house after politely explaining that he wasn’t allowed to get into cars with strangers—had become distraught upon learning that he had apparently done something very bad.
There it is. This should have ended it. A short discussion between the security guard and the mother, with the mother explaining that her son was fine should have been the end of this, and the security guard could rest easy if he saw the kid outside again.
I’m Gen X and you already know our stories--gone from dawn to dusk in the summer with a stop in for lunch. Why have we done a complete 180 on this? Why are parents so afraid of fucking everything, it seems?
Its the Republicans and their fear mongering, almost every network tv has overflow of cop/crime shows. They think they’re tough but whom is the real snowflakes in this country?
Parents are afraid someone will call the cops on the kid, and the cops will call the state, and now your kid could be taken away, or you (the parent) arrested.
We made tracking easy. Why leave your kid out all day if they have a phone that you can call whenever to make sure they’re safe? Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times?
As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped, and as soon as we stopped, we no longer trusted them with anything. That’s the issue with convenience - we’ll do anything so long as its easy and sounds useful, and we won’t bother wondering what the repercussions of that might be.
Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents. They became the early adopters of this technology that didn’t need to be convinced to use it. The only kids I knew with phones growing up were the ones with parents who needed them to call to check in every hour.
But soon more and more kids had phones, so the paradigm quickly shifted, and what used to be considered overbearing and helicoptering became a normal amount of worry. You kid has the phone - why not call? Subsequently, not having your kid call to check in on a regular basis was soon seen as neglectful.
The same thing happened with phone tracking and things like air tags. At first I knew a few people who used them for their kids, and they felt the need to defend their decision to use them, but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.
Dude (ma’am?) I had kids in the 90s and 2000s and was never a helicopter parent and though I do agree with your damned if you do, damned if you don’t, the world is judgemental as fuck, that over-involved parenting style is not harmless either. My kids were in a group of kids at school and even in HIGHSCHOOL some of those parents tracked their kids everywhere they went. It’s a level of surveillance I cannot imagine imposing. But it wasn’t all the kids ever. The surveilled kids did not do well adjusting to freedom, and didn’t trust their parents much. I don’t think it hurts little kids as much as long as you have a plan to build their independence before high school, which these parents did not.
It is true here that elementary school won’t let kids be walkers now without an adult or teenage sibling to walk with them at dismissal. You can arrange a walk-pooling group but it has to have a grownup. From the bus they don’t though, can just walk home.
The kids across the street from us still run in the yard by themselves and run up the street to visit their friends, there are I’d say 8 year olds riding bikes alone & in groups, we do not live in an HOA or gated anything just in a neighborhood in the city. Though I obviously don’t know if the bike kids are air-tagged or something, they look like when I was little just fewer of them now.
Yeah, it seems different parts of the country adopted this differently, then. I grew up in suburban Minnesota in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, and all us kids would just get on our bikes and go wherever we wanted all day. I remember frequently biking to a convenience store I liked that was about 2 miles away all on my own in 1st grade so I could buy candy with my spare change. The only kids whose parents cared at all to check in were the ones that the other parents complained were too nosy, and only those kids had cell phones before the mid 2000’s came around and it seemed everyone’s parents finally gave in and got them a cell phone. I didn’t see people care about where their kids were until they already had the technology to do so.
Makes sense; it’s a pretty big country - I’m not surprised different places had different ideas of safety. I’m sure it’s a complex mix of factors like everything else in the world. I wish we could just make one change and undo the fearfulness, but I imagine it’ll be a slow climb if we make it out at all…
We gave our kids airtags for awhile. Mostly so that we didn’t have to traverse the neighborhood and knock on every one of our kids’ friends’ houses to see if they were there. It was like playing whack-a-mole trying to track them down at one point. “He was just here, but then they went off to [redacted]'s house. But I think maybe they said they were going to play at the monkey bars for a bit…”
I have four kids, eldest is 12 and youngest is a toddler. My three older ones, starting at age five, have free-run of our neighborhood–along with the host of other, similar aged children here. They’re often out until the street light comes on. All the parents are in a group chat and we keep tabs on what’s going on. Additionally, my 12 y/o rides the city bus home from middle school every day (along with a ton of his classmates) and it’s not uncommon for us to allow our 10 y/o to ride the city bus with his friends to the mall like five miles away.
But this is Hawai’i. It’s how things are here. Kids are given a lot more independence and we tend to have closer relationships with our neighbors (it also doesn’t hurt that we live in a kind of tucked-away community). I used to live in Florida and none of this would have ever flown. Even when I lived on a private school campus (as a faculty member), there was a clear understanding that kids were not allowed outside without some form of supervision. We were gated in and had multiple security guards!
There it is. This should have ended it. A short discussion between the security guard and the mother, with the mother explaining that her son was fine should have been the end of this, and the security guard could rest easy if he saw the kid outside again.
I’m Gen X and you already know our stories--gone from dawn to dusk in the summer with a stop in for lunch. Why have we done a complete 180 on this? Why are parents so afraid of fucking everything, it seems?
Its the Republicans and their fear mongering, almost every network tv has overflow of cop/crime shows. They think they’re tough but whom is the real snowflakes in this country?
This seems like a big part of it.
A scared and ignorant populous is an easily controlled populous. They’ve been working to that end for decades.
Parents are afraid someone will call the cops on the kid, and the cops will call the state, and now your kid could be taken away, or you (the parent) arrested.
And there weren’t tracking devices in every pocket back then either.
While true, there was a network of mothers who called each other without our knowing about it
That’s fair, I definitely remember a lot of “hey, your parents are looking for you,” usually while I was already on my way home.
We made tracking easy. Why leave your kid out all day if they have a phone that you can call whenever to make sure they’re safe? Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times?
As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped, and as soon as we stopped, we no longer trusted them with anything. That’s the issue with convenience - we’ll do anything so long as its easy and sounds useful, and we won’t bother wondering what the repercussions of that might be.
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Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents. They became the early adopters of this technology that didn’t need to be convinced to use it. The only kids I knew with phones growing up were the ones with parents who needed them to call to check in every hour.
But soon more and more kids had phones, so the paradigm quickly shifted, and what used to be considered overbearing and helicoptering became a normal amount of worry. You kid has the phone - why not call? Subsequently, not having your kid call to check in on a regular basis was soon seen as neglectful.
The same thing happened with phone tracking and things like air tags. At first I knew a few people who used them for their kids, and they felt the need to defend their decision to use them, but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.
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Dude (ma’am?) I had kids in the 90s and 2000s and was never a helicopter parent and though I do agree with your damned if you do, damned if you don’t, the world is judgemental as fuck, that over-involved parenting style is not harmless either. My kids were in a group of kids at school and even in HIGHSCHOOL some of those parents tracked their kids everywhere they went. It’s a level of surveillance I cannot imagine imposing. But it wasn’t all the kids ever. The surveilled kids did not do well adjusting to freedom, and didn’t trust their parents much. I don’t think it hurts little kids as much as long as you have a plan to build their independence before high school, which these parents did not.
It is true here that elementary school won’t let kids be walkers now without an adult or teenage sibling to walk with them at dismissal. You can arrange a walk-pooling group but it has to have a grownup. From the bus they don’t though, can just walk home.
The kids across the street from us still run in the yard by themselves and run up the street to visit their friends, there are I’d say 8 year olds riding bikes alone & in groups, we do not live in an HOA or gated anything just in a neighborhood in the city. Though I obviously don’t know if the bike kids are air-tagged or something, they look like when I was little just fewer of them now.
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Yeah, it seems different parts of the country adopted this differently, then. I grew up in suburban Minnesota in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, and all us kids would just get on our bikes and go wherever we wanted all day. I remember frequently biking to a convenience store I liked that was about 2 miles away all on my own in 1st grade so I could buy candy with my spare change. The only kids whose parents cared at all to check in were the ones that the other parents complained were too nosy, and only those kids had cell phones before the mid 2000’s came around and it seemed everyone’s parents finally gave in and got them a cell phone. I didn’t see people care about where their kids were until they already had the technology to do so.
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Makes sense; it’s a pretty big country - I’m not surprised different places had different ideas of safety. I’m sure it’s a complex mix of factors like everything else in the world. I wish we could just make one change and undo the fearfulness, but I imagine it’ll be a slow climb if we make it out at all…
We gave our kids airtags for awhile. Mostly so that we didn’t have to traverse the neighborhood and knock on every one of our kids’ friends’ houses to see if they were there. It was like playing whack-a-mole trying to track them down at one point. “He was just here, but then they went off to [redacted]'s house. But I think maybe they said they were going to play at the monkey bars for a bit…”
Elder millennial, same here
OK, but to be fair, we really really shouldn’t have been drinking out of hoses
I still do.
Oppression
I have four kids, eldest is 12 and youngest is a toddler. My three older ones, starting at age five, have free-run of our neighborhood–along with the host of other, similar aged children here. They’re often out until the street light comes on. All the parents are in a group chat and we keep tabs on what’s going on. Additionally, my 12 y/o rides the city bus home from middle school every day (along with a ton of his classmates) and it’s not uncommon for us to allow our 10 y/o to ride the city bus with his friends to the mall like five miles away.
But this is Hawai’i. It’s how things are here. Kids are given a lot more independence and we tend to have closer relationships with our neighbors (it also doesn’t hurt that we live in a kind of tucked-away community). I used to live in Florida and none of this would have ever flown. Even when I lived on a private school campus (as a faculty member), there was a clear understanding that kids were not allowed outside without some form of supervision. We were gated in and had multiple security guards!