<p>Letting a nine year old child ride the subway is CRAZY!</p>
<p>amtc – LOL!
Well, I guess it makes sense – why wouldn’t it continue?
Here’s a question, though – do her kids also helicopter? Can you have competing helicopters?
Can helicoptered kids become helicopter parents themselves or do they need their own parents to do it for them?</p>
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<p>I’ve never tried it in New York City, but it is perfectly safe in Taipei.</p>
<p>My mom had a cowbell too! That’s how she called us in to supper, and in for bed when we played outside after dinner. Nowadays kids get too much homework to play outside much after dinner. I remember several times that one of us neighborhood kids had to run to find a parent to rescue their child who was stuck up in a tree, or who was bleeding profusely and needed stiches. No one hovered.</p>
<p>Hey TheGFG</p>
<p>When I was a kid–we’d ride our bikes everywhere–
and I rode across town, or to the grocery store etc, the librarey etc…
Once I tried to jump up a curb onto the safer walk (the rode was really busy) and fell…the pedal gouged out a 5 inch gap in my shin/calf.</p>
<p>Here I am standing there crying …and no one stopped! I was on my way home from a friend’s house and it happened at the entrance to the local swim club/community park area.</p>
<p>I rode how with a towel wrapped around my leg…bleeding…about 1.5 miles…
ended up with stitches. Odd because in that small community, no one thought to stop…in fact many moms with kids…leaving the park for the afternoon in their station wagons, just looked at me crying and with my leg gaping and open, looked both ways and merged into the rode.</p>
<p>I recall too my brother having several er visits…broken hand, stitches under his eye…from playing sports in someone’s yard…no adults around.</p>
<p>I remember riding the bus to downtown Dallas to meet my dad for lunch in the summer when I was 7. Mom would take me to the bus stop and wait for it to arrive. Dad would be waiting at the downtown end. </p>
<p>Same thing for taking the train the 50 miles to visit grandparents. Usually my older brother and I went together, but I remember we went when I was 6 and he was 8.</p>
<p>I walked to grade school (starting in 2nd grade) unless the weather was really bad, but it was in a residential area and was only about a 1/2 mile walk. There were hordes of other kids doing the same.</p>
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<p>That was my life, too. We all played in a double vacant lot on the corner. Boys and girls. It just seemed to work out fine. In the summer, the only rule was be home by ___ for dinner. You walked or rode your bicycle every where–the 7-11, the city swimming pool, down to Turtle Creek etc. </p>
<p>Heck – when I was 10 (1960) I had a paper route and on Sunday it was a morning addition that had to be delivered to all customers before 6:00 a.m. </p>
<p>I’d set my alarm, get up at 4:00 and ride my bicycle to the street corner where the route manager dropped my bundle of papers. I did this until the end of my junior year in HS. My parents never got up with me.</p>
<p>Here’s something mafool said, “The goal is to get from complete dependence at birth to complete independence.”</p>
<p>My goal: to get my own 92 yo mother to go back to complete independence. She’d rather I was that helicopter parent. It’s going in reverse at our house: my mother would now prefer that I not only decide when it’s time to eat lunch or dinner (and everything else), but also decide what we all eat and make it too. And I hate cooking! Cooking at dinnertime is one thing, but around here, lunch is much less organized. With my mother now living with us, she’d like to be completely dependent on me. UGH!</p>
<p>We have been accused of being mean, thoughtless parents because we won’t pick our HS aged kids up at school-it’s about a mile away.We also made them walk to elementary and middle school. I admit, I was happier that there were 2 of them…
We let them travel on the public transportation in Geneva, Switzerland when they were 12 and 13, but people leave babies in strollers outside of the grocery stores there.</p>
<p>MaFool, we had a similar experience, I think. People thought that D had a lot of discipline when she was young, a lot of freedom when she was older. Thought we were foolish for saying “No!” and then enforcing it when she was as young as 18 months.</p>
<p>Never had party/curfew issues because she wasn’t inclined that way (having 18-20 hours/week of ballet while taking AP classes will do that to you, I guess) but she had increasing amounts of decision-making input and choices from a very early age. </p>
<p>She wound up being a very self-propelled young adult.</p>
<p>Btw, Navarre, I was taking the Chicago subway either solo or with a friend at not later than age 11. And I rode cross-country solo on a train when I was 9. No ill effects. Except possibly that I developed a “recon” personality and for a while practiced self-reliance to an obnoxious fault.</p>
<p>An extreme case of a young child taking the subway in New York City: </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/nyregion/24runaway.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/nyregion/24runaway.html</a></p>
<p>Actually, tokenadult, the main thing I take away from this story is how safe the subway is: a middle schooler with some serious difficulties communicating and coping in social situations spent 11 days on the subway and nothing bad happened to him.</p>
<p>I think the whole “overparenting” argument is over-rated. Most people who get into top schools have VERY involved parents. The parents don’t have to be necessarily involved at the kid’s schools, but they are paying attention to what’s going on under the hood, if you know what I mean?</p>
<p>Involvement takes many forms. Many, if not most, of them are not pathological. But denying children the opportunity to make mistakes when the consequences are relatively small and to develop a sense of self-mastery is not wise, IMO.</p>
<p>Do you think that the highly “managed” kids do as well in college and beyond as their non-helicoptered counterparts? My friend and her husband have completely orchestrated their D’s academic life by making sure she was tutored pre-emptively beginning in elementary school, selecting her high school classes for her, arranging “research” (sometimes it was actually cleaning and clerical) opportunities for her at the local university (parent’s employer) and formulating the D’s “own” research interests. D, for the most part, allows herself to be shepherded this way. She will lkely be accepted to a top school, judging by how these people succeeded with their older children. I’d like to see a longitudinal study of kids like these 10 years down the road. It’s possible that most of them eventually internalize the habits of success foisted on them by their parents and it all works out in the end. But I wonder if the more sensitive of these children don’t feel depersonalized–like they’re their parents product.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t have the 10-year view, TheGFG, but in my highschool, what you describe is pretty typical. I have seen 3 years worth of kids getting into top schools (Yale, Harvard, Columbia). There parents ALL were Very Involved (even being on the School Board). The one in Yale is a sophomore now with a 4.0 (we’re friends). A guy I know who is Stanford, just graduated from a 5 year program magna cum laude, or something like that.
My guess is that these kids who were prodded, instructed (whatever) will get great jobs. They can have their nervous breakdown at a time when they can afford to pay for a shrink. HA!</p>
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<p>That’s the thing I took away from the story too: no passer-by harmed the young child while he was alone in the subway system.</p>
<p>The kid was lucky. The subways can’t be counted on to be that safe. The quality of life thing is backsliding under Bloomberg. Not so much that it’s not still the safest city, but enough to be noticeable.</p>
<p>I rode the bus alone at age 9. The question is, do you have a savvy, skeptical urban 9-year-old, or is he the kind of kid who’d have his head in the clouds?</p>
<p>A crowded space like a bus is a very safe place for anyone with the mindset, and the confidence, to make a big scene.</p>
<p>I agree that the subways can’t be “counted on” to be safe, but then neither can a gated suburban enclave. There is no place on earth that can be counted on to be safe. But the story does support the idea that the subway is a much less dangerous environment than many people imagine it to be, and therefore a parent letting a child ride the subway alone is a less reckless choice than it might appear.</p>
<p>Sorry, but I think having a nine-year old ride the subway alone is ludicrous. Among other reasons, there is a huge amount of re-routing going on every weekend and it’s almost impossible for adults to navigate in some places. There are some environments that aren’t appropriate for children that young, and the NYC subway is one of them. It’s fine to not be a helicopter parent, but that doesn’t mean one has to swing to the extreme of irresponsible and foolish. Transporting a nine-year old is a normal part of parenting.</p>