The "free range kids" issue is so important, from a parent's perspective. It was simply the way things worked for my (boomer) generation, but also my dad's and probably all earlier generations. I think there's really two big factors here. We gave our two daughters freedom/permission to roam, but also we decided to live in a place where lots of roaming on foot or bike was possible—a university town in the upper midwest.
I grew up in suburban Atlanta, back when our new house was on the suburban fringe. So much undeveloped wooded land surrounded our neighborhood! I would be gone all day on weekends and throughout the summer. Today, that neighborhood is considered an inner-ring suburb, and all that undeveloped land has turned into fenced-off apartments and office parks. The two-lane collector streets are now major arterials that are four to six lanes wide, and traffic has increased by an order of magnitude. A child raised today in the house I grew up in would have no place to go on foot or bike.
Advice to parents of young children: move someplace where your kids can be set free. It will make a huge difference in their development in terms of self-confidence, creative problem-solving, and general independence.
We live in a mixed-income neighborhood, and we have much more opportunity for free ranging kids. The overscheduling of kids is very much an upper-middle class issue. Kids in the neighborhood is truly one of the reasons we haven't pursued moving anywhere.
Great ideas! My own effort toward the Sabbath idea is to have a social media break on Sundays. I post it on Instagram and Twitter and it is good for my peace of mind to take that break once every week. I would love it if I started a trend, but don't see that happening.
On the free-range kids issue--I also believe that is very important. The high school my kids attended here in Pittsburgh was downtown and drew from all over the city (it was an arts high school students had to audition for). Instead of busing the students, the school gave each of them a monthly bus pass. My kids learned how to get all over the city on the bus and developed confidence as autonomous travelers as a result. I wish the people who fear for our kids walking home would put all that energy into arguing for restrictions on guns. The proliferation of guns in the U.S. poses the real risk to our kids' safety, not random people they meet while walking home.
I read your poem to a friend, she said it was very good and we laughed that these were supposedly useful phrases!
Regarding the unsupervised children going to school I used to walk through woods from my elementary school to my house in the afternoons with a friend. One day a man opened his coat to us revealing everything! We screamed and ran. Thankfully nothing bad happened and I am not scarred for life! But I “get” the worry parents have. A friend came from Germany to NJ, her kindergarten daughter would walk fro her house to school about 1/2 mile or so with several small roads to cross until a group of well meaning but busybody moms all told my friend how dangerous that was. Prior to coming to the States all her children had ridden the bus and then train to a nearby town in Germany alone (with all the kids from their village) but no parents! When they moved back to Germany 3 years later it took several weeks before her daughter was “ok” to travel alone again.
I wonder if imposing a weekly forced day off would be a good thing in the U.S. While I appreciated the habit in Germany and Switzerland, I wondered about what effect it had on single people, or those without families to "hang out with" on Sundays. I would assume that by now there are whole groups of people who like to "work on weekends" and have their Monday/Tuesdays free (while the rest of us are working.) I myself could only afford college because I was able to work every weekend. Such a change would require an entire cultural shift that goes beyond what otherwise sounds like a simple tweak to the system.
I agree with the kids thing, and I thank the lord almightly that I had a childhood and young adulthood to enjoy before cell phones and the internet were invented.
Great article and good thinking. I'm very much in agreement with you though I'd like to offer a small counterpoint to the idea that a company that closes on Sunday would go out of business: both Hobby Lobby and the supremely popular Chick-fil-A are closed on Sundays. A small thing, I know, but it's reminder of what we could do.
This really, really resonates with me. As a GenXer, I grew up free range in a suburban neighborhood, and biked to school and to my part-time job at the mall. 15 years ago, one of the main factors in choosing the house that my husband, GenZ kid, and I now live in is that it is walking distance from her elementary and middle schools. We were thrilled when she was walking herself to the middle school, sometimes meeting friends along the way -- and then the Covid lockdowns hit. And one of the casualties was the city bus route that used to stop on our corner and go right by the high school. Now we, like every other LA family, have to drive her to school. And to all her other activities. And with the lockdowns she seems to have missed the window of learning to make her own “playdates” as a tween/teen. So most of her socializing continues to be online. :-(
Meanwhile, I have extended family in Central Europe, and when I visit there I see my cousins’ kids living the same kind of life you describe in Prague. Makes me wistful for what could have been.
So you’re writing one of my very favorite substacks and I’ve been wondering where you were. I see you wrote other posts after the “freebie” one which I never got a notification of. Boo!
I think there’s been an issue with some of the notification emails and Twitter notifications too (for other substacks). So maybe substack has been having some issues. It does that from time to time.
Anyway! I’ll just try to remember to look on Wednesdays now, which will be much easier than remembering to look on Thursdays (my busiest day).
The point you make is so good. Yes we can often see great ideas right in front of us, like going back to a more “free range kids” approach, or having our kids just do the extracurriculars that they love and care about, but unless everyone else goes along, and the chances of that are close to zero, the good thing simply won’t happen.
But then here’s a puzzle:
Other weird (negative, harmful) things in our culture sometimes take on a life of their own, and seemingly everyone “cooperates” with really lousy new ideas and I just wonder, “Well, what happened THERE to make an entire nation of people cooperate and do this stupid new harmful thing, but we can’t let kids walk to the store or do activities they like?”
The "free range kids" issue is so important, from a parent's perspective. It was simply the way things worked for my (boomer) generation, but also my dad's and probably all earlier generations. I think there's really two big factors here. We gave our two daughters freedom/permission to roam, but also we decided to live in a place where lots of roaming on foot or bike was possible—a university town in the upper midwest.
I grew up in suburban Atlanta, back when our new house was on the suburban fringe. So much undeveloped wooded land surrounded our neighborhood! I would be gone all day on weekends and throughout the summer. Today, that neighborhood is considered an inner-ring suburb, and all that undeveloped land has turned into fenced-off apartments and office parks. The two-lane collector streets are now major arterials that are four to six lanes wide, and traffic has increased by an order of magnitude. A child raised today in the house I grew up in would have no place to go on foot or bike.
Advice to parents of young children: move someplace where your kids can be set free. It will make a huge difference in their development in terms of self-confidence, creative problem-solving, and general independence.
We live in a mixed-income neighborhood, and we have much more opportunity for free ranging kids. The overscheduling of kids is very much an upper-middle class issue. Kids in the neighborhood is truly one of the reasons we haven't pursued moving anywhere.
Great ideas! My own effort toward the Sabbath idea is to have a social media break on Sundays. I post it on Instagram and Twitter and it is good for my peace of mind to take that break once every week. I would love it if I started a trend, but don't see that happening.
On the free-range kids issue--I also believe that is very important. The high school my kids attended here in Pittsburgh was downtown and drew from all over the city (it was an arts high school students had to audition for). Instead of busing the students, the school gave each of them a monthly bus pass. My kids learned how to get all over the city on the bus and developed confidence as autonomous travelers as a result. I wish the people who fear for our kids walking home would put all that energy into arguing for restrictions on guns. The proliferation of guns in the U.S. poses the real risk to our kids' safety, not random people they meet while walking home.
I read your poem to a friend, she said it was very good and we laughed that these were supposedly useful phrases!
Regarding the unsupervised children going to school I used to walk through woods from my elementary school to my house in the afternoons with a friend. One day a man opened his coat to us revealing everything! We screamed and ran. Thankfully nothing bad happened and I am not scarred for life! But I “get” the worry parents have. A friend came from Germany to NJ, her kindergarten daughter would walk fro her house to school about 1/2 mile or so with several small roads to cross until a group of well meaning but busybody moms all told my friend how dangerous that was. Prior to coming to the States all her children had ridden the bus and then train to a nearby town in Germany alone (with all the kids from their village) but no parents! When they moved back to Germany 3 years later it took several weeks before her daughter was “ok” to travel alone again.
I wonder if imposing a weekly forced day off would be a good thing in the U.S. While I appreciated the habit in Germany and Switzerland, I wondered about what effect it had on single people, or those without families to "hang out with" on Sundays. I would assume that by now there are whole groups of people who like to "work on weekends" and have their Monday/Tuesdays free (while the rest of us are working.) I myself could only afford college because I was able to work every weekend. Such a change would require an entire cultural shift that goes beyond what otherwise sounds like a simple tweak to the system.
I agree with the kids thing, and I thank the lord almightly that I had a childhood and young adulthood to enjoy before cell phones and the internet were invented.
Great article and good thinking. I'm very much in agreement with you though I'd like to offer a small counterpoint to the idea that a company that closes on Sunday would go out of business: both Hobby Lobby and the supremely popular Chick-fil-A are closed on Sundays. A small thing, I know, but it's reminder of what we could do.
This really, really resonates with me. As a GenXer, I grew up free range in a suburban neighborhood, and biked to school and to my part-time job at the mall. 15 years ago, one of the main factors in choosing the house that my husband, GenZ kid, and I now live in is that it is walking distance from her elementary and middle schools. We were thrilled when she was walking herself to the middle school, sometimes meeting friends along the way -- and then the Covid lockdowns hit. And one of the casualties was the city bus route that used to stop on our corner and go right by the high school. Now we, like every other LA family, have to drive her to school. And to all her other activities. And with the lockdowns she seems to have missed the window of learning to make her own “playdates” as a tween/teen. So most of her socializing continues to be online. :-(
Meanwhile, I have extended family in Central Europe, and when I visit there I see my cousins’ kids living the same kind of life you describe in Prague. Makes me wistful for what could have been.
So you’re writing one of my very favorite substacks and I’ve been wondering where you were. I see you wrote other posts after the “freebie” one which I never got a notification of. Boo!
I think there’s been an issue with some of the notification emails and Twitter notifications too (for other substacks). So maybe substack has been having some issues. It does that from time to time.
Anyway! I’ll just try to remember to look on Wednesdays now, which will be much easier than remembering to look on Thursdays (my busiest day).
The point you make is so good. Yes we can often see great ideas right in front of us, like going back to a more “free range kids” approach, or having our kids just do the extracurriculars that they love and care about, but unless everyone else goes along, and the chances of that are close to zero, the good thing simply won’t happen.
But then here’s a puzzle:
Other weird (negative, harmful) things in our culture sometimes take on a life of their own, and seemingly everyone “cooperates” with really lousy new ideas and I just wonder, “Well, what happened THERE to make an entire nation of people cooperate and do this stupid new harmful thing, but we can’t let kids walk to the store or do activities they like?”
It’s a puzzler!!
Yay I want to join a a choir too!!!! Excited to hear about it from you maybe?
I agree!