Writing last month about a Georgia mother arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk less than a mile away from home, I was stunned. Hers is not the only case like this. In another, a mother was thrown in the slammer for stopping the van and having her eight-year-old son walk home. They were in their own suburban neighborhood; it was a short distance to walk. Anyone who has been trapped in a car with a hyperactive boy knows time outside is the cure. Get him out of the car!
But now such reasonable and low-risk action might get you in trouble. What’s the solution? There isn’t one. Not a simple one, at any rate. There is no turning back the clock or neatly recalibrating societal expectations. As always, we are left to bump along the treacherous road of life, making the best of it and trying to get along with the people around us.
It is irritating when in a relatively safe residential neighborhood and people stop the car to accost children with questions when they are a mere block ahead of mom. But that will not change. It can be tempting to think that the solution to this state of insanity is to let the kids loose, consequences be damned! That’s foolish for two reasons: 1) the aforementioned arrests. 2) children of previous generations were not simply left to fend for themselves.
The latter point is one I had not fully thought through until talking with a man of a previous generation. While he is by no means old, the social context of his childhood is lightyears away from people under 40. When I used the word “unsupervised” to describe kids outside, he suggested that was not the experience of neighborhoods 50 years ago. While the parents were certainly not monitoring their children’s every move, someone was.
My friend explained that the people most often keeping an eye on the neighborhood were grandmothers on the front porch. If you, as a kid, did something against the code of conduct and civil expectations of the neighborhood, your parents would hear of it. The street would not descend into “Lord of the Flies” with bored children torturing each other and destroying property.
A couple years ago, I had a similar realization about the glory of summer: It does not mean total lack of supervision. Without an underlying scaffolding of order and purpose, most people cannot cope with unstructured time.
With some guardrails and checking in through the kitchen window, children can cultivate order in their games. Some are more inclined than others, but often neat rows of rocks, stores of broken sticks, pots of leaves: order emerges. Finding a way to both monitor from afar and offer real independence is a delicate dance in a culture that does not support such an endeavor, but it can be done
