I’ve often thought of how much more often/severe I was wounded than my children. Mostly I think due to bikes and going barefoot.
My mom was (is) rather a hypochondriac for herself, but she didn’t much believe in doctors for us or stitches if she could get our skin back together with adhesive tape. She was a strong believer in alcohol. If only I had a dime for every time she said, “If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not working.” I thought I was in heaven when my boyfriend’s mom used peroxide for cuts.
I’m not even going to go into how DH ended up in the burn unit for 10 days and that large black stain ended up on the ceiling in the stand alone guest house he occupied on his parents’ property while he was a teenager. He and his best friend have never told DH’s parents the actual story.
SMH…
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Personally, I’m not quite sure why the KIDS in your H’s family, m2ck, didn’t learn after getting hurt the first time.
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@romanigypsyeyes I’m sure some of the 8 kids did, but some sure didn’t. The girls in the family seemed to be better at learning from painful mistakes…maybe testosterone can get in the way? lol… I don’t know WHY some kids learn from their mistakes, and some don’t. Some just don’t. Maybe it’s denial. Maybe it’s impulsiveness. I don’t know. Kids are wired differently, for sure.
And, absolutely…some careful parents still have tragedies happen to their kids. No way of parenting is perfect, but I think trying to “lessen the odds” of something terrible happening is a good idea. And, I don’t mean being crazy controlling…lol.
@mcat2 <<<
He is pretty much free ranged now. We hear from him very infrequently (maybe 2 times a month, each time only a brief call. No news is a good news.
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lol…your son is in his 20’s…he should be fully free ranged now!
I have no issues with typical free-range parenting. I have concerns about extreme free range parenting…particularly when it starts at a very young age. (memories of grabbing a very sharp knife from a 2 year old’s hands as she was walking on a sandy beach…what was the mom thinking?)
mom2- my parents were involved in our life but not our activity during the day, We went out and played and came back for dinner. It was a neighborhood where the smallest family had 5 kids and the largest 13. You put a large group of teen boys together and things happen.
There’s free range and there’s neglect.
^^^
right…that’s what I’m referring to with “extreme free range”.
It’s one thing to be more diligent with kids when they’re very young/young, and then as they demonstrate mature thoughtful decisions, give them more free range. It’s another thing to never be diligent and NEVER assess whether your child(ren) has the maturity to be trusted with additional free range.
As @twoinanddone described, she has one child who seemed to choose the most riskiest ways of doing things. No wonder she had to be more diligent. A neglectful parent would just treat all the same, regardless of one child’s demonstrated impulsiveness and risk-taking.
My risky child took 4 swimming lessons per week when she was 2.5 (after being tossed from the Mommy and Me class for being too rough around the babies-should I have noted this expulsion on her college apps?) because she would not stop jumping into water - puddles, off the diving board, in the dog pool, in fountains. She was determined to drown. She weighed about 20 pounds, had no body fat, and couldn’t float, but had no fear. Her method of jumping in and having someone save her had worked so far, and she didn’t see any reason to stop jumping into water. Thus the endless lessons. My second child had a death grip on me any time she was near water until she was 3.
I grew up pretty free range, but it was a small town and we knew everyone. Still, there were a bunch of dangerous thing we did as young kids (swimming at the spillway dam, jumping into the river with logs and other who knows what in the way, riding bikes on the highway, in the dark) and they only got worse as we got older and snowmobiles and motorcycles and boats and cars were involved. I don’t think my parents had any idea that we were building ramps over bonfires and jumping motorcycles over them like Evel Kinneval. Yes, alcohol was involved. We knew it wasn’t safe but we did it anyway. I would never let my kids do the things I did.
I don’t think my kids walked across a street alone until they were in at least 6th grade, and it’s not because I’m a helicopter parent. They went to daycare and private schools when they were young, to which they were driven. They did activities and took lessons, to which they were driven. They had play dates, or the older kids version, to which they were driven. Even in middle and high school, unless they were walking around our small neighborhood, they needed to be driven to get places. Once they got their cars they also got independence, and once they were 18 or so I no longer made them account for where they were at all times. I always request they let me know if they will not be coming home.
I can remember roller skating in San Francisco, down hill, with no helmet, walking over a mile by very busy streets to go swimming (with my 4th or 5th grade relative as chaperone), crossing over 8 lane expressways to get to the other side, riding my bike to wherever it would take me, taking buses across San Francisco with my teenage relatives to go trick or treating in the “better” places, and other interesting things like that. I was not that adventurous, so unless my older relatives were around I did tent to stay close to home. I remember a friend broke her arm at the park across the street, and a kind stranger drove her and my grandmother, who was watching us, to the hospital. I remember the zodiac killer in California impacting my trick or treating (I was no longer allowed to go), and also impacting what my teenage relatives were allowed to do.
Life was certainly different “back then.”
Evil Knievel! Of yes. I remember jumping bikes and dirt bikes over ramps and one kid cutting his finger off somehow in the vacant lot across the street doling that. Not to mention disappearing into the woods for hours at a time where there were creeks and snakes and all kinds of ways to get killed. Coming home dirty and all scraped up. And not telling my mother where exactly I had been.
Later alcohol and pot and boys and again not telling everything. Bad stuff did happen: car crashes and pregnancies. (Not to me; I was a careful wild one, knowing even then not to drink and drive.) Bad stuff still happens, despite all the helicoptering.
That reminds me that there were kids whose parents wouldn’t let them spend the night with my kids. I was shocked at that level of protectiveness. My kids were nerds, still are, no danger there. I remember the mom explaining how it was so dangerous to let kids spend the night at each other’s houses. Woo boy!
But who remembers spending the night with friends and staying up all night and crank calling and having seances and lying down in the middle of the road and waiting for a car to come and trying to pick up older boys by lying about your age? I guess that mom remembers doing all that, too!
We had a convenience store that was a few blocks away and I can remember often walking to it to either buy “penny candy” or to buy bread or milk that my mom needed. The kindergarten was half a mile away, and I walked. After kindergarten, I went to private schools and was driven. I lived in that house until summer after 2nd grade.
When we moved, there was a supermarket a few blocks away, and I had a bike with a big basket in the front. My mom would regularly give me money and a list of things to buy for her.
Maybe because I had been assaulted by strangers as a young child, my mom knew that I was cautious and would be less likely to make myself vulnerable around strangers. I was the type to just go directly to the store, get the stuff, and come right back. I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping off at a friend’s home first unless that had been previously cleared.
@1214mom makes a good point. Many kids today are driven to things rather than walking/biking. I really can’t tell you how old my kids were before they crossed “busier” streets on their own. The crossed streets in our neighborhood, but I don’t think they did that until maybe kindergarten or older.
I want to further address the comment about how even more careful parents sometimes have bad things happen to their children. Yes, that’s true. My mom wasn’t far away when I was assaulted, (our home was on a corner lot and I was on one side of the home, and mom was on the other) She and a neighbor quickly came when I screamed and caught the two people. But to think that a parent shouldn’t bother to be careful just because bad things can happen anyway, is short-sighted. A person can study for a test, and still fail or not do well. That doesn’t mean that a person shouldn’t bother to study for a test. The person who didn’t study is more likely going to fail or not do well than the person who did.
We had two girls from my town murdered by a serial killer. They were one and two years younger than me. One of the girls was in the group of kids I hung around with. That did change the dynamics in town for the younger girls in town but I do not recall any change for the girls in my class or older. The girls were either hitch hiking or he just took them off the street. The killer was never convicted of those murders but he was the only suspect. There were several murders in the area during that time.
^ That is truly horrible, tom.
Not being afraid of spomething has nothing to do with being raised free or under control. My D. was never afraid of water, ever, while she was absolutely afraid of everything else. So…she ended up a terrific swimmer who could not run, play soccer, basketball, or anything to do with the ball. I guess, while jumping from the high dive at the age of 4 (they did not measure kid’s height at that point in our lives), she was not comfortable at all playing any ball games and hated running.
Being afraid or not of anything has no correlation to anything that we parents teach. NONE. I was always amazed at parents who pushed their balbies to learn to be comfortable in a water, Why? it can only turn them off for several years too! When D. said that she is NOT returning to the soccer session after trying for the first time in her life, I said OK after I paid for the whole month. Just could not watch my kid to stand there so unhappy and having no idea what to do. While another exptreme was a competitive swim team try out at the age of 4. I could not believe my eyes, I knew that she never swam 4 of 25 yards in a row with small breaks - all 4 strokes. She did not know how but she definitley was trying to at least imitate others while we, parents were sitting on the other side of the pool, so she had no input, no advice, nothing I could do to help her and she was just amazingly resourceful all on her 4 y o own self. The coach said that she was in, I could not figure it out, I guess, they saw that she simply was not afraid. She was in competitions very soon after that.
Did you all see this?
An 11-year-old boy playing alone in his driveway was taken into custody by CPS and his parents were arrested for child negligence.
Already being talked about on another thread. Like I said there, I withhold judgement considering the source is a person and magazine with very clear agendas and there is no evidence presented other than the parent’s word.
I don’t know if states are now setting age limits on children able to be ‘left at home alone’ - but when my niece and nephew in WI were younger, mother found out from the State that at that time, WI did not have a specific age. The mom just set clear safety guidelines for the kids when she and they felt they were old enough, and they followed w/o problems. I know in my current state, if you are older than 12 you are considered too old for daycare. I started babysitting at 12/13.
He wasn’t just playing alone. He was playing alone because his parents were late getting home and he couldn’t get into the house because he didn’t have a key. There’s an element of poor planning there, although I’m not sure that it rises to the level of negligence (although it might in very hot or very cold weather or if he’s a very light-skinned child who sunburns easily).
It was Florida and the kid was playing with a basketball… so highly unlikely that there was a problem with needing shelter from the elements. My son was a latchkey kid at age 11 – he walked home from school every day on his own-- didn’t see me until I arrived home hours later.
I agree that it sounds like there must be more to the Florida story, but it sure sounds crazy.
I was a latchkey kid at 8; my sister was 9, and we had an older brother who was a freshman in college who arrived home in the late afternoons after he was done with classes. We were oddities in our neighborhood, but I can’t imagine anyone reporting us to the authorities.
Now parents can have a garage door opener with a push button code installed for kids that ‘forget’ or lose their house key.
A friend of mine whose mother was working when she was in kindergarten in Miami (her dad died at the early 60’s Cuban conflict by Castro’s militia) was a latch key kid until her mother remarried. She knew her route to and from school and neighbors also looked out for her.