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"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervise

"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park." By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. However, before I could get to see her I had to walk several miles to her home and this involved crossing a very busy four-lane arterial highway. I was no exception, as this was the norm for kids of my age. Moreover, such things were never a big deal for us kids, it was just the way things were back then. We gave such concerns little thought if any at all. This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation. In my estimation, overprotecting kids rates on a much higher scale of child abuse than some[1] matters which are normally associated with it. If you are a modern-day parent and overprotecting your children then you need to think twice about the damage and harm that you are causing them. It is very difficult to acquire resilience if it's not acquired very early on in one's life, and those who don't are often forever handicapped. _ [1] Of course, that excludes any form of sexual abuse, it's inexcusable and unacceptable under any circumstance.

moret1979 4y ago
Related to this, deeply focused on the American experience: The Coddling of the American Mind > (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. > Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...) https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224897 https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
- hilbert42 4y ago
  Thanks for that info, I'll check it out.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Blaming that last one on education seems like a stretch to me. It's hard for kids these days not to default to "good vs evil" when there's a major political party dedicated to actively rolling back what they've grown up with as rights.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    There was the same major political party doing the same thing in the '90s and the '00s. In fact, some of those rights weren't even rights yet (e.g. gay marriage). The only difference today is the dramatic reaction to it justifying black-and-white thinking. Even with more polarized political parties today, the world is a lot more complicated than "Republicans Evil." If the teens of today can't grasp that, it's at least a failure of society to develop their emotional resilience (or cynically - it's the fault of an economy that is breeding & preying on their lack of resilience and nuance).
  - goatlover 4y ago
    People have different value systems, and different beliefs about the role of government. I might not agree with some of those values or beliefs, but it doesn't make one side evil. It's a philosophical difference over how society should work. Humans and societies are much more complex than good and evil. Good and evil, or heroes and villains are for fiction and religious narratives. And the reductive belief in people being good or bad tends to lead to holy wars and radicalization.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Back in my day we blamed Dr. Benjamin Spock.
carabiner 4y ago
Out of curiosity, do you have experience raising kids, or do you plan to?
- watwut 4y ago
  What he said is true in large part of world, bith in western countries and non-western ones. In particular, 9 years old being unable to play alone in own back yard is deeeply ridiculous.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  The concerns of parents are somewhat irrelevant to the discussion. TFA is about what is good for kids.
cecilpl2 4y ago
To add another datapoint: I'm not even that old (born in the mid-80s). When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home). At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown). At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.
- F2XDBeK92twqqAD 4y ago
  Yep, born in 1993, I didn't get to stay home alone or walk to school regularly (til high school), but I certainly spent hours and hours outside unsupervised (especially during summer vacation), pretty much from the time I started school. And so did most of my classmates...
- spacechild1 4y ago
  Born in the late 80s in Austria, we were playing outdoors without supervision since elementary school. Walking around in villages, building tree houses, going to the lake, exploring the forests. Me and my sister would sometimes spend 2 weeks home alone while my parents where on holidays, with only my grandma living across our house and cooking for us. I grew up on the country side, I'm sure my life would have been very different if had been raised in a city. Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?
joshellington 4y ago
Also at 10, my parents put me on a cross-country flight by myself from PDX to Atlanta (to visit family). Note, this was in 1999, not some bygone era. I imagine there would be an Amber Alert nowadays if someone noticed me sitting by myself on an airplane.
- bitlax 4y ago
  This is very common.
- F2XDBeK92twqqAD 4y ago
  Airlines literally have a special thing that costs a ton extra and results in the kid being monitored constantly by an airline employee. (I got to see the jet bridge being "driven" up to the airplane because the guy who was watching me never had his relief show up!) https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unaccompanied-minors.jsp https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc...
- bombcar 4y ago
  https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unaccompanied-minors.jsp https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc... It still exists, and there are policies around it. Amtrak does the same but starts at 12: https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy
- jack_h 4y ago
  My parents divorced when I was very young and my dad ended up getting a job in a different state. So by age 4-5 I was flying alone between parents semi-regularly. This was in the late 80s to early 90s.
- alar44 4y ago
  1999 was pre 9/11 and also 23 years ago. Most people didn't have cellphones and many people didn't even have the internet. It's a bygone era.
pdonis 4y ago
I'm with you on overprotecting kids being a bad thing, but it's pretty rich for The Atlantic to be telling parents not to teach their kids to fear the world, when their stock in trade, like that of practically all media outlets, is to constantly teach parents to fear the world.
- plutonorm 4y ago
  It's entirely on brand. They are playing into parent's fear of being too afraid. It's fear inception. Fuck off, I'm keeping my kids in the house until at least 10yo and that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it. Strangers are potentially dangerous, high things are dangerous. The world will mess you up in a moment if you don't use your whole being, your gut and your head, to move intelligently within it. Being carefree and ignorant is not an optimal strategy, nor is it the path to a life lived in truth. And ultimately a life lived beautifully. Vacuous joy is not the goal here.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    > that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it Care to explain?
    - rhino369 4y ago
      Might overcharge for their plumbing services.
    - plutonorm 4y ago
      There was literally an attempted kidnapping down the road from me, when a man in a white van tried to give a child sweets. What is not to understand?
      - tasuki 4y ago
        Where I'm from (Eastern Europe), this is not generally a thing. Is it easier to kidnap a child using a white van? Or do the would-be kidnappers always use white vans so as to be more easily spotted? Is the plan to kidnap the child and... raise them as a member of one's own family? Try to blackmail the parents? Something worse? This whole situation is hard for me to understand, your confidence about white vans in particular.
moonchrome 4y ago
>By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :( But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.
jrumbut 4y ago
> This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation. I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation? Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet. The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"
- moonchrome 4y ago
  >The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?" I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Also media hysterics. The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV. They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state. People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.
    - nradov 4y ago
      The real change started with the kidnapping and murder of Eton Patz in 1979. The case was nationally publicized, and was one of the factors leading to putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons. That really scared a lot of parents (I do understand that the fear was mostly irrational). https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-patz/ https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-p...
deleted 4y ago
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DavidPeiffer 4y ago
A coworker in grad school was from China and talked about at age 3 needing to go to the market to buy some basic groceries, fix his own food, and he was alone in the apartment while his parents worked. It was an eye opening conversation to have just a handful of years ago. Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.
- the_af 4y ago
  Wow. At age 3 some children cannot fully verbalize what they want or need, and some still are not potty trained. I'm ready to accept some 3 year olds can do this, but I think it's unreasonable to expect most children at age 3 to be able to go to the supermarket to buy groceries and fix their own food...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Depending on what you define "fix your own food" as, most 3 year olds will be able to do something akin to it; if permitted. Our one year old could walk to the kitchen and extract things from the fridge, though she would have difficulty opening some of them.
    - the_af 4y ago
      My 3 year old cannot open the fridge, she doesn't have the strength/dexterity. She cannot open lids either. She cannot fix any kind of meal without making a mess. With play-doh she pretends to make meals and definitely makes a mess (and enjoys herself tremendously in the process). She absolutely cannot go to the supermarket to buy anything, and she cannot cross the street either. A 3 year old doing all those things... I'm willing to believe some can, but it's definitely not the norm, and not because we don't let them. They just can't.
      - RalfWausE 4y ago
        I think this is more of a "you have to" thing: I vividly remember many 3 - 4 year olds on the vietnamese side of my family being MUCH more ahead of the ones from the german side... i would think it could be that we in the west put too little challenge up for our kids
matwood 4y ago
I was latchkey kid, born in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact ages, but I was always alone or with friends from a very young age. My neighborhood had a 4 lane highway on one side and rivers on the other 2. The only rule was don't cross the highway. We spent most days in the rivers fishing, water skiing and generally being idiots, and I'll readily admit that I look back at those times and wonder how no one drowned. My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening. Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
  - willis936 4y ago
    And yet the rate of mass shootings has doubled since the 90s.
    - dnissley 4y ago
      In absolute terms, is it still a small amount? Doubling doesn't mean much if the number was infinitesimal to begin with.
    - int_19h 4y ago
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Depends on where you come from, I guess. I remember that we teased the kid who still got picked up by his parents from school when he was 9. I walked to and from preschool alone when I was 6. Usually took the shortcut through the woods. During the winter it was almost pitch black. It was scary.
bombcar 4y ago
And today's kids can easily have a device that communicates with satellites every few seconds to determine their position on the globe, and can update servers with that position instantly, along with communication with nearly anyone on earth. When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.
- notch656a 4y ago
  The issue is the busybodies also have that device and the opportunity cost for them to make false claims about your child's safety that result in weeks to months of harassment by authorities is practically nill for them. And thanks to the way the CPS reporting laws are written, literally illegal to find out who the busybody was or face your accuser.
dionidium 4y ago
It should be noted that rate of accidental deaths in childhood has fallen drastically since then: > Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident. Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-lower-child-mortality https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-low... The freedoms you describe did not come without significant cost. Some families paid the ultimate price.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  No doubt that's very true. However, making the world a safer place by assessing the data and then making changes is not the same as nuking kids' autonomy. The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that. If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us? No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia. I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers. What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront). As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should. As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on. I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood. Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.
rr888 4y ago
Daily Mail did this a few years back. "How children lost the right to roam in four generations" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
LorenPechtel 4y ago
This. Inter-city trains weren't even an option where I grew up but I went to my grandmother's on my own (city bus, crossing major streets) at I'm sure 8 and perhaps 7. We attempted to use public transit to get me to private school at IIRC 8, it didn't work only because too often the bus didn't stop for me. At 10 I was taking one class off campus--and getting there by public transit. There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
How is this not survivorship bias?
rufus_foreman 4y ago
By the time I was 10 I was also completely unsupervised. I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children. We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice! The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him. He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.
- notch656a 4y ago
  There are stories of well supervised, loved, and resource-rich children doing worse.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    I don't think so. I think well supervised pretty much rules out kids doing anything like what we did. What would the parents have said, were they there? Only a 50% markup on stolen goods kids, don't be greedy?
unixbane 4y ago
> [1] How do you bring up the boogeyman out of nowhere when explaining that we believe in way too many boogeymen?
senectus1 4y ago
>"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park." interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels. My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.
As_You_Wish 4y ago
Damn, right? I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!" It's a different world.
lukaszkups 4y ago
yeah I was raised in similar manner, but as a father of 2 right now I see - in my personal case - the biggest difference that makes me afraid about my kids: I don't know around half of my closest neighbours It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better. Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time. It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle. In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.

moret1979 4y ago

Related to this, deeply focused on the American experience: The Coddling of the American Mind > (...) ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. > Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. (...) https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224897 https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...

hilbert42 4y ago
Thanks for that info, I'll check it out.
crooked-v 4y ago
Blaming that last one on education seems like a stretch to me. It's hard for kids these days not to default to "good vs evil" when there's a major political party dedicated to actively rolling back what they've grown up with as rights.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  There was the same major political party doing the same thing in the '90s and the '00s. In fact, some of those rights weren't even rights yet (e.g. gay marriage). The only difference today is the dramatic reaction to it justifying black-and-white thinking. Even with more polarized political parties today, the world is a lot more complicated than "Republicans Evil." If the teens of today can't grasp that, it's at least a failure of society to develop their emotional resilience (or cynically - it's the fault of an economy that is breeding & preying on their lack of resilience and nuance).
- goatlover 4y ago
  People have different value systems, and different beliefs about the role of government. I might not agree with some of those values or beliefs, but it doesn't make one side evil. It's a philosophical difference over how society should work. Humans and societies are much more complex than good and evil. Good and evil, or heroes and villains are for fiction and religious narratives. And the reductive belief in people being good or bad tends to lead to holy wars and radicalization.
hindsightbias 4y ago
Back in my day we blamed Dr. Benjamin Spock.

carabiner 4y ago

Out of curiosity, do you have experience raising kids, or do you plan to?

watwut 4y ago
What he said is true in large part of world, bith in western countries and non-western ones. In particular, 9 years old being unable to play alone in own back yard is deeeply ridiculous.
jessaustin 4y ago
The concerns of parents are somewhat irrelevant to the discussion. TFA is about what is good for kids.

cecilpl2 4y ago

To add another datapoint: I'm not even that old (born in the mid-80s). When I was 9 I walked a mile to school with my 6-year old sister, unsupervised (and stayed at home alone for an hour after school until my parents got home). At 12 I commuted to school on a city bus for an hour (with a transfer downtown). At 14.. jeez, I'm pretty sure at 14 my parents left me alone in the house for a long weekend.

F2XDBeK92twqqAD 4y ago
Yep, born in 1993, I didn't get to stay home alone or walk to school regularly (til high school), but I certainly spent hours and hours outside unsupervised (especially during summer vacation), pretty much from the time I started school. And so did most of my classmates...
spacechild1 4y ago
Born in the late 80s in Austria, we were playing outdoors without supervision since elementary school. Walking around in villages, building tree houses, going to the lake, exploring the forests. Me and my sister would sometimes spend 2 weeks home alone while my parents where on holidays, with only my grandma living across our house and cooking for us. I grew up on the country side, I'm sure my life would have been very different if had been raised in a city. Funnily enough, I still remember all the very stupid and dangerous thinks we did when we were kids, which makes me afraid when I think about my own daughter... How do you deal with this problem?

joshellington 4y ago

Also at 10, my parents put me on a cross-country flight by myself from PDX to Atlanta (to visit family). Note, this was in 1999, not some bygone era. I imagine there would be an Amber Alert nowadays if someone noticed me sitting by myself on an airplane.

bitlax 4y ago
This is very common.
F2XDBeK92twqqAD 4y ago
Airlines literally have a special thing that costs a ton extra and results in the kid being monitored constantly by an airline employee. (I got to see the jet bridge being "driven" up to the airplane because the guy who was watching me never had his relief show up!) https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unaccompanied-minors.jsp https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc...
bombcar 4y ago
https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unaccompanied-minors.jsp https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/special-assistance/unacc... It still exists, and there are policies around it. Amtrak does the same but starts at 12: https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy https://www.amtrak.com/unaccompanied-minors-policy
jack_h 4y ago
My parents divorced when I was very young and my dad ended up getting a job in a different state. So by age 4-5 I was flying alone between parents semi-regularly. This was in the late 80s to early 90s.
alar44 4y ago
1999 was pre 9/11 and also 23 years ago. Most people didn't have cellphones and many people didn't even have the internet. It's a bygone era.

pdonis 4y ago

I'm with you on overprotecting kids being a bad thing, but it's pretty rich for The Atlantic to be telling parents not to teach their kids to fear the world, when their stock in trade, like that of practically all media outlets, is to constantly teach parents to fear the world.

plutonorm 4y ago
It's entirely on brand. They are playing into parent's fear of being too afraid. It's fear inception. Fuck off, I'm keeping my kids in the house until at least 10yo and that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it. Strangers are potentially dangerous, high things are dangerous. The world will mess you up in a moment if you don't use your whole being, your gut and your head, to move intelligently within it. Being carefree and ignorant is not an optimal strategy, nor is it the path to a life lived in truth. And ultimately a life lived beautifully. Vacuous joy is not the goal here.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > that white van that has been seen prowling around is a serious threat and they should know about it Care to explain?
  - rhino369 4y ago
    Might overcharge for their plumbing services.
  - plutonorm 4y ago
    There was literally an attempted kidnapping down the road from me, when a man in a white van tried to give a child sweets. What is not to understand?
    - tasuki 4y ago
      Where I'm from (Eastern Europe), this is not generally a thing. Is it easier to kidnap a child using a white van? Or do the would-be kidnappers always use white vans so as to be more easily spotted? Is the plan to kidnap the child and... raise them as a member of one's own family? Try to blackmail the parents? Something worse? This whole situation is hard for me to understand, your confidence about white vans in particular.

moonchrome 4y ago

>By the time I was 10 I was allowed to be unsupervised and to get on a bus to a railway station, purchase a ticket for an intercity train that took me the better part of 100 miles away to another city then alight there at a major railway junction with many platforms and from there catch a suburban train to my final destination where my grandmother lived. Pfff, when I was 7 or 8 I took the local bus to the intercity bus station and then took that 200km to get to my grandparents. I had to figure out what bus to get on to and when to get off. I remember nobody even asked me for ticket money, just asked me where I was going. I was super happy because I got to pocket the money - but then I lost somewhere on my way there :( But I was one of 4 children in a poor family (at the time, eventually we got up to 6). I can't see myself risking my son on something as stupid, the amount of near death experiences I've had as a child, it freaks me out when I think about my son doing something like that, and I can't really say I'm better off for it either - I was just bored, poor and didn't have anything better to do.

jrumbut 4y ago

> This - unlike millions of today's kids - is why my generation were and still are a much more resilient lot and not afraid of the world than is the present younger generation. I marvel at this logic. Who raised the present younger generation? Children didn't make the rules that they can't buy train tickets. They weren't born afraid. Their resiliency hasn't been molded yet. The question isn't "why are kids this way?" The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?"

moonchrome 4y ago
>The question is "why are we raising children this way when we weren't raised this way ourselves?" I feel like the investment into individual children is much much higher than it used to be (time/resources/emotions). When you have 5 kids it's not that you don't care, but you literally can't be as protective about them as you can when you're only raising one or two. And then as people have less children the norms gradually change.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Also media hysterics. The same number of kids were probably abused in a variety of ways 50 years ago. Maybe more than today, even. But what most people knew about the news was what was in the local paper and maybe they watched 30 minutes of national news on TV. They didn't have a device in their pocket alerting them in real-time about a kidnapping story in another state. People are not good at assessing probability of risk. If they hear about something, they think it's likely. So they get more and more afraid.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The real change started with the kidnapping and murder of Eton Patz in 1979. The case was nationally publicized, and was one of the factors leading to putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons. That really scared a lot of parents (I do understand that the fear was mostly irrational). https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-patz/ https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/kidnappings/etan-p...

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DavidPeiffer 4y ago

A coworker in grad school was from China and talked about at age 3 needing to go to the market to buy some basic groceries, fix his own food, and he was alone in the apartment while his parents worked. It was an eye opening conversation to have just a handful of years ago. Starting around age 6 or 7 I was going into the woods playing with a friend and by 11 or so my parents had no problem with me riding my bike whwrever I wanted to around town, well before I had a cell phone.

the_af 4y ago
Wow. At age 3 some children cannot fully verbalize what they want or need, and some still are not potty trained. I'm ready to accept some 3 year olds can do this, but I think it's unreasonable to expect most children at age 3 to be able to go to the supermarket to buy groceries and fix their own food...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Depending on what you define "fix your own food" as, most 3 year olds will be able to do something akin to it; if permitted. Our one year old could walk to the kitchen and extract things from the fridge, though she would have difficulty opening some of them.
  - the_af 4y ago
    My 3 year old cannot open the fridge, she doesn't have the strength/dexterity. She cannot open lids either. She cannot fix any kind of meal without making a mess. With play-doh she pretends to make meals and definitely makes a mess (and enjoys herself tremendously in the process). She absolutely cannot go to the supermarket to buy anything, and she cannot cross the street either. A 3 year old doing all those things... I'm willing to believe some can, but it's definitely not the norm, and not because we don't let them. They just can't.
    - RalfWausE 4y ago
      I think this is more of a "you have to" thing: I vividly remember many 3 - 4 year olds on the vietnamese side of my family being MUCH more ahead of the ones from the german side... i would think it could be that we in the west put too little challenge up for our kids

matwood 4y ago

I was latchkey kid, born in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact ages, but I was always alone or with friends from a very young age. My neighborhood had a 4 lane highway on one side and rivers on the other 2. The only rule was don't cross the highway. We spent most days in the rivers fishing, water skiing and generally being idiots, and I'll readily admit that I look back at those times and wonder how no one drowned. My dad also worked a bunch of jobs, one of which was selling firewood. At a young age I wasn't strong enough to move the logs around, but I could run the hydraulic splitter while he did the heavy lifting. I hated it at the time, but looking back at it fondly now because it was time with my dad teaching me about hard work by example. I ended up helping him with many of his jobs often late into the evening. Are kids too protected today? IDK. Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. Zero social media meant when I was teased a school and went home, it didn't follow me. So while maybe kids are too protected now, the dangers have changed.

chimeracoder 4y ago
> Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day. This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.
- willis936 4y ago
  And yet the rate of mass shootings has doubled since the 90s.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    In absolute terms, is it still a small amount? Doubling doesn't mean much if the number was infinitesimal to begin with.
  - int_19h 4y ago

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Depends on where you come from, I guess. I remember that we teased the kid who still got picked up by his parents from school when he was 9. I walked to and from preschool alone when I was 6. Usually took the shortcut through the woods. During the winter it was almost pitch black. It was scary.

bombcar 4y ago

And today's kids can easily have a device that communicates with satellites every few seconds to determine their position on the globe, and can update servers with that position instantly, along with communication with nearly anyone on earth. When I was a teenager, if my parents wanted to find me on weekends, they'd have to resort to calling other parents until they tracked me down.

notch656a 4y ago
The issue is the busybodies also have that device and the opportunity cost for them to make false claims about your child's safety that result in weeks to months of harassment by authorities is practically nill for them. And thanks to the way the CPS reporting laws are written, literally illegal to find out who the busybody was or face your accuser.

dionidium 4y ago

It should be noted that rate of accidental deaths in childhood has fallen drastically since then: > Between 1960 and 1990 the death rate for children aged five to 14 fell 48 percent ... a growing share of the accelerating reduction in child mortality arises from a sharp drop in deaths from unintentional injury or accident. Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-lower-child-mortality https://www.nber.org/digest/dec99/reducing-accidents-key-low... The freedoms you describe did not come without significant cost. Some families paid the ultimate price.

hilbert42 4y ago
No doubt that's very true. However, making the world a safer place by assessing the data and then making changes is not the same as nuking kids' autonomy. The environment can be made safer for kids - and everyone for that matter - and the fact that that it is happening is a very good thing and only to be welcomed. Very, few would ever deny that. If we were to revert back to attitudes of the 1950s and '60s and give today's kids the same freedoms and autonomy that kids had in that past era (except perhaps for some extreme cases at the margins), then where would that leave us? No doubt, the mortality rate would rise for the aforementioned age groups but by how much? Those stats of 48% have to be carefully examined and broken down by location then state by state and then country by country (which would require additional data) if we are to gain accurate and meaningful figures. All else being equal, it may be that the actual freedoms and autonomy afforded to kids have to be scaled by location and circumstance - what's applicable in, say, NYC would likely be quite different to those for a town in outback Australia. I don't know the answer to that question and I've not seen any figures to indicate that anyone else knows them with any level or degree of certainty. Only further research will provide accurate answers. What I'm about to say next troubles me the most. I have an overactive amygdala and any discussion of metrics concerning kids' lives horrifies me but perhaps we may have to eventually confront the issue no matter how uncomfortable it may be (the death of any kid upsets me terribly and it's something that I'd personally much rather not confront). As a society, like it or not, we may be confronted with the situation were we have to weigh up the mental health and suicide statistics for kids against the risks and dangers of providing them with additional freedoms to explore the world in ways they see fit - either singly by themselves and or with their mates. That's not saying adults shouldn't provide guidance, of course they should. As I said, I don't the answers, but what I do know is that eventually we will have to confront the issue head-on. I think it fitting to finish by saying that in hindsight and after witnessing the increasing rates of psychological problems and distress in kids today, that I've come to realize that the autonomy and freedoms that I had as a kid were near the most important developmental aspects of my childhood. Frankly, the thought of growing up in today's society with its mixed and conflicting ethics and the strictures placed on kids' freedoms by both parents and society at large simply horrifies me.

rr888 4y ago

Daily Mail did this a few years back. "How children lost the right to roam in four generations" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...

LorenPechtel 4y ago

This. Inter-city trains weren't even an option where I grew up but I went to my grandmother's on my own (city bus, crossing major streets) at I'm sure 8 and perhaps 7. We attempted to use public transit to get me to private school at IIRC 8, it didn't work only because too often the bus didn't stop for me. At 10 I was taking one class off campus--and getting there by public transit. There's also a secondary issue with overprotecting kids--they don't learn to be wary of the things they do need to be wary of. I'm thinking of a case here many years back, 13 year old only looks one (the wrong) way before walking through the school zone--2 minutes before the lights came on. She stepped out right in front of a truck. And I routinely see it in the wilderness--20's, 30's out there with no thought of what might go wrong. Just Sunday I saved a guy from a very unpleasant night--his phone was dead, he took the wrong fork and didn't realize it. I had talked to him earlier, encountered him again and realized he was on the right trail but going the wrong way. (He was parked at a different trailhead than I was.) No phone = no call for help and almost certainly no light--note that this was the day after a new moon--and even if he realized which branch to take at the next junction it still would have put him back in civilization several miles from his car. And if he took the wrong one--the trail name says "loop" but that will take you over an almost 12k summit, a total of nearly 20 miles.

krainboltgreene 4y ago

How is this not survivorship bias?

rufus_foreman 4y ago

By the time I was 10 I was also completely unsupervised. I would distract the 7-11 clerk while my accomplice filled his backpack with candy, which he would then sell at elementary school at a 100 to 200 percent markup to the supervised children. We would also rob the fifth grade school supplies store, which we were supposedly working at, and again, he would sell everything we stole for more than the people we stole from were selling it for. This is a good business tactic if you can make it work! This is not legal advice! The last time I saw my accomplice would have been 89 or 90, I was in court to support a friend who had a minor criminal charge for some porch theft she had done, he was going down for possession of LSD with intent to sell. I think that's what the charges were, it was a long time ago. This was in the south, and in the early 90's in the south, I'm sure he did some time for that. I don't know what happened to him. He did have his memories of a completely unsupervised youth to fall back on, as do I.

notch656a 4y ago
There are stories of well supervised, loved, and resource-rich children doing worse.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  I don't think so. I think well supervised pretty much rules out kids doing anything like what we did. What would the parents have said, were they there? Only a 50% markup on stolen goods kids, don't be greedy?

unixbane 4y ago

> [1] How do you bring up the boogeyman out of nowhere when explaining that we believe in way too many boogeymen?

senectus1 4y ago

>"...children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park." interesting.. this is roughly the milestones we've used for our kids. Not because that was told to us or we read it anywhere. Just because thats how we judged the kids capabilities and confidance levels. My son (the oldest) hit the milestones a bit earlier then my daughter.

As_You_Wish 4y ago

Damn, right? I remember being 4-years-old and unsupervised a lot. By 6 years old for sure. By 8...."Get out of the house and out from under my feet and don't come back until dinnertime! Now get out!" It's a different world.

lukaszkups 4y ago

yeah I was raised in similar manner, but as a father of 2 right now I see - in my personal case - the biggest difference that makes me afraid about my kids: I don't know around half of my closest neighbours It's not that I don't want to get to know them, it's that everyone are so busy (me included) that I don't simply have time to align with them to learn more about them better. Also, tons of people are moving in and moving out all the time. It wasn't the case in my home village - I knew a lot of people and even more people (my parent friends that I didn't know) knew who I was. I could bet at that time that if something bad was going on for me, there would be someone who will help me without any struggle. In my current place is different. Even my relatives who stayed in my home town can agree that even there a lot of people are moving in and out and they don't know all of the townspeople anymore.