The Daily Mail maps how, in four generations, children have lost an enormous amount of freedom to roam far from home. What a shame. Here’s hoping I’ll be comfortable letting my kids more freedom than the 300 yards that now seems to be standard. Heck, 300 yards won’t even get ’em off of our land.
Comments are closed.
I was just having this conversation with my neighbor, and she was saying she wish she would have let her kids roam more.
I said I understood how she could become fearful with the media reports in the 1980’s, but statistics show that most child abductions are made by family members (usually estranged). The random unknown child abductor is very rare.
I can’t imagine not being free to roam. Grew up on a farm in East Anglia (England) and roamed the farm and the two nearest villages at will. When my family moved back to the states, my brother and I never asked permission – we simply rode our bikes all the way across town (ages 11 and 10) to visit mom at her new job (which happened to be at a toy store). I think that was ~9 miles from home across one state highway (four lanes, traffic lights). She figured it must be ok since we made it and were not stressed about it in the least.
300 yards!!! You can still hear your brothers shouting over that short a distance… how the heck to you get away from them for some quiet time?
Oh – I should let people know – when my brother and I made that ride, my dad was asleep on the living room couch (grin).
I remember as a child, riding my bike miles from my home to play on a golf course and its neighbooring woods….stopping at various points along the way to play or jump or bikes over that days impromptu ramp.
No cell phone strapped to me, no GPS chip is some region of fatty tissue…
Today, I would be wired up with a plethora of gadgets, devices and implants that no only know where I am, but what my heart rate is and if I have to pee or not…slathered head to toe in SPF 50…to travel 300 feet.
Makes perfect sense…todays children are limited in freedom to the range of an unrepeated ethernet signal. Bloody sad.
I’d like to see a study of the roaming ability of kids in a large area. My suspicion would be that kids in the country and city would have larger areas than the kids in the burbs (you know, where parents move to because “the kids need a yard.”).
~
My roaming space was pretty much limited to the point where I realized “Damn, it’s going to be a long bike ride home” (in Germany) or where I couldn’t figure out which bus would get me back (in England). Lucky kid, for the most part.