This is a follow-up to my posts on Where have all the children gone and More on the “Missing Children”.
Bruce Schneier writes about how overprotective we’ve become of children. He quotes a story of a mother who lets her son take the New York City subway home on his own, trusting him to follow her instructions and be safe.
Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.
Now, I may not have grown up in New York City, but as a kid I used to wander for miles and miles on my own. I’m sure many people reading this can say the same thing – and we all turned out OK, right?
So why are we so scared to let children go out and actually be children?
It’s true that I wandered about a lot when I was young, but I don’t think I’d feel safe, even now, in New York alone. It’s not that I wouldn’t trust my son or daughter, but I’ve noticed the higher density of people, the worse there seems to be.
I was contemplating this just this morning as I heard about the whole thing…and what I would actually attribute it to is our current “disconnection” in life. For whatever reason, it feels like people are getting more and more paranoid of each other and more and more disconnected from each other.
What this breeds is suspicion and eventually hatred; our children are what we can apply this to.
It is a sad state of affairs when even children in relatively rural areas aren’t allowed to wander beyond their own yard. There’s this link that Bruce Schneier pointed out, showing how far a generation ago was allowed to go, compared with the current generation of children (it is a map of an area in the UK).
It is sad because I think roaming around is a good thing, something fundamental and very important in the development of children – it certainly was for me. When we take that away from children, we “stunt” them, limiting their growth. In other words, we hold them back too much, and in doing so, we hurt them.
So sad…