Good News?

I guess this is a good thing, except that it seems pathetic to me that it should even need to be directly addressed: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...3ce72c-0b99-11e5-95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html

I didn't read deeply into the comments (that's usually a recipe for heartbreak) but I had to agree with the recent comment:

Can we stop calling normal children doing normal children things, "free range"? They're not chickens.

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I find it baffling that anyone would reasonably argue otherwise. Kids need time to themselves to grow and develop into functional people, despite the (very low) risk. The kids I know today are overprotected as far as I see but not to the extent described here. Is it really that bad out there?

There we have a new term for us older people. We where "free range" kids before free range was cool. OR do we just call it before the 70's.

Agreed Trevor - I think that the greatest thing a parent can do is let them have some alone time to explore. I remember my parents letting me ride my bike around the neighborhood or playing at the neighbor's place for hours on end. Additionally, when I was a little older I was allowed to roam around the countryside. This is what I credit partly for my love of the outdoors, and furthermore it has helped open some of my creative side. Parents should help guide their children to whatever their interests are and support those decisions, granting them enough time to explore things.

And yes children are way too protected and shielded today. Furthermore, with subdivisions getting more and more cramped with smaller yards kids have no reason to get outside and enjoy the great outdoors. Moving to the country as child was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

I've been following this story in The Post. I think the kids were fairly young, and one of the articles said they had to walk a mile before they were home. I think cases like this depend heavily on what kind of neighborhood they are in. Is it reasonably safe or is it high crime? I think this neighborhood is reasonably safe. The worst part of this story is that after the parents were warned, they did the same thing all over again and this time, the cops picked the kids up while they were walking home. What soon becomes terrible is that the police don't tell the parents that they have their children until many hours later, trying to make the parents frantic.

Like others have responded, I went everywhere on my own as a kid, even as a very young kid. But I really do think times were different in that there weren't as many brazen predictors. I'm sure there were just as man pedophiles, but I was a kid at a time when houses had porches and neighbors watched out for each other. Everyone knew me, which meant I had to be a lot more wiley when it came to getting in trouble. I had my first experience in the back seat of a police car by the time I was 11, but he was a lot nicer than today's police, and I didn't even get shot to death because I had a deadly pea shooter on me.

ah, yes, i remember seeing this in the fly-on-the-wall documentary, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,


anyway, didn't the parents teach the kids never to go off with strangers?
and shouldn't the police stick their mandate of 'kill them, kill them all!!!!'

it's all another triumph of democracy.

dogboy said:

.... I didn't even get shot to death because I had a deadly pea shooter on me.

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i don't believe a word of it.