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Post by myboysnme on Apr 7, 2022 12:16:35 GMT
I grew up in the 60s and I was walking downtown by myself probably at age 8. I know at 10 I was babysitting for other people.
I will say I had several scary experiences being by myself when people targeted me but thankfully was never physically harmed.
Frankly thinking about how young some of you were and even myself scares me just thinking about it. My boys could go off our street to friends probably at 7 or 8 but thats it.
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RosieKat
Drama Llama
PeaJect #12
Posts: 5,538
Jun 25, 2014 19:28:04 GMT
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Post by RosieKat on Apr 7, 2022 15:30:34 GMT
When I was really young, I never lived close enough to walk/ride a bike anywhere except friend's houses, and most of my friends lived just a few doors down on the same street. I moved in 4th grade, and my BFF and I would walk to the convenience store that was about a mile away starting when we were probably 5th or 6th grade. And sometimes we would walk through this huge field maybe a mile and a half to go to Target, but that was a rare occasion kind of thing. I think those were the only places I ever lived close enough to walk to. But she and I would often just walk and walk through the neighborhood while we talked, so we'd disappear for hours at times.
When my kids were in a situation to first be able to walk to school, they walked together to the elementary and they were in 1st and 4th grades. Once DD moved on to MS, DS was in 3rd and I let him walk alone. I would walk with him sometimes because he wanted me to, but he got over that pretty quickly. We let our son go alone to a friend's house that is in the neighborhood but across a very busy street beginning in about 4th grade, just asking that he called when he got there and before he left to come home. And he started biking a couple of miles to another friend's house starting in 5th grade or so. DD didn't really have places she wanted to go until about 6th grade, but she and 2 friends went pretty much everywhere when they were in 7th grade and Covid hit.
I've noticed a lot more helicopter-y parents at the middle school this year. DD was in MS for the last 3 years (this is her first year of HS) and DS is now in his 2nd year at MS.
When DD started there (pre-Covid), there were some people who'd drop off and pick up, most kids rode the bus, and the neighborhood kids would walk or ride bikes. The car riders would just walk over to the car and get in, the walkers/bikers would go off by themselves or maybe with a friend or two.
Now, just 3 year later and "post" Covid, it's very different. There are fewer bus riders, although that can be attributed to the shortage of bus drivers - it means they are packing the kids into fewer buses without enough seats, much less any semblance of social distancing even back in August or during Omicron. It's why I drop off and pick up my kid now. But the weird thing to me is that a huge portion of the parents picking up their kids will go walk over to the door of the school and wait for their middle schooler there. That never happened before. And I see a fair number of parents walking or biking with their kid to school, too - again, something that never happened before. (This is a suburban, lower- to mid-middle class neighborhood with great sidewalks, so not an inherently unsafe neighborhood or anything.)
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Post by melanell on Apr 7, 2022 17:00:17 GMT
Gosh, I can't remember exactly. Our issue was that the one little market nearby was just far enough away that our mom couldn't watch us from anywhere on our property plus we'd have to cross a fairly busy main road. That same little market was just before the elementary school, and I did used to walk back and forth to school at age 6, but there was a crossing guard at the road at those times.
I know I was certainly going to the store both with siblings and alone before the age of 10, but I don't know when between 6 & 10 I first started being allowed to cross that street alone. And yes, once I did start going on my own, I bought cigarettes as well---a fact that never fails to shock my kids.
I can recall being allowed to just go for walks fairly young, though----just walking to a neighbor's to play or simply up and down the block, but we just didn't live anywhere that I could actually reach a public destination on my own street, or even the closest neighboring streets.
Now, by say 11, I was walking all over town on my own.
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Post by melanell on Apr 7, 2022 17:06:01 GMT
Now, I know my DH was able to go to his local corner market at a younger age, but their market was only a block and a half away, and his parents could watch him from the front porch all the way to the corner where the store was. And he only had to cross little side streets. (Which had a lot less traffic then they do now.)
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Post by melanell on Apr 7, 2022 17:22:59 GMT
The drivers ed teachers I worked with said they could always tell the walkers because their car navigation skills were significantly better than those who had been driven everywhere. They said that increasingly kids couldn’t even figure out how to drive from school to home! I think kids having devices in the cars makes this issue worse, because they are not paying attention to the world around them as they are being driven about. One of my nieces, at an age when I already would have been doing quite a lot of walking on my own, accidentally missed her bus stop once, got off just one stop further down, and despite being at a place where she could have literally seen her proper bus stop if she had just turned her head and looked, she called her parents on her cell phone saying that she was lost. And she was only a matter of 4-5 blocks from home.
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Post by crazy4scraps on Apr 8, 2022 14:12:21 GMT
I've noticed a lot more helicopter-y parents at the middle school this year. DD was in MS for the last 3 years (this is her first year of HS) and DS is now in his 2nd year at MS. When DD started there (pre-Covid), there were some people who'd drop off and pick up, most kids rode the bus, and the neighborhood kids would walk or ride bikes. The car riders would just walk over to the car and get in, the walkers/bikers would go off by themselves or maybe with a friend or two. Now, just 3 year later and "post" Covid, it's very different. There are fewer bus riders, although that can be attributed to the shortage of bus drivers - it means they are packing the kids into fewer buses without enough seats, much less any semblance of social distancing even back in August or during Omicron. It's why I drop off and pick up my kid now. But the weird thing to me is that a huge portion of the parents picking up their kids will go walk over to the door of the school and wait for their middle schooler there. That never happened before. And I see a fair number of parents walking or biking with their kid to school, too - again, something that never happened before. (This is a suburban, lower- to mid-middle class neighborhood with great sidewalks, so not an inherently unsafe neighborhood or anything.) I’m going to attribute part of my helicopteryness to the abductions of Jacob Wetterling and Jaime Closs, both of which happened in relatively “safe” areas in my general region. Jacob was 11 and with friends when he was snatched off his bike and Jaime was 13 when she was spotted at her bus stop and targeted by her abductor, and that’s 7th-8th grade. Living somewhere “safe” doesn’t mean that there aren’t evil people roaming around. The small town where our lake cabin is located is home to numerous level 3 sex offenders. While I understand intellectually that these kinds of incidents are pretty rare, just being aware that they happen at all makes me want to be a little more cautious and attentive. I know that my kid tends to not be particularly aware of her surroundings. Situations that have happened to me personally, my sisters and my friends have caused me to be hyper aware of my surroundings and the people around me until I can hammer it home to my kid that it’s really important to pay attention to who and what is going on around her.
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casii
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,517
Jun 29, 2014 14:40:44 GMT
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Post by casii on Apr 8, 2022 15:18:32 GMT
My parents generally preferred to live far, far away from civilization so I didn't get to venture out much.
But we rented a house in town when I was in 3rd grade and it was a glorious year. I walked to school and to Brownies. Brownies was across town and across a busy highway. A few of us walked from school to Brownies and after one parent showed us how to navigate cross walks, we never had parental supervision again. After that we moved back out to the middle of nowhere.
When my parents split up, mom was a zombie. We lived one summer with my aunt, uncle and cousins. 7 people in a little 3 bedroom rancher. I got to shop and cook for all 5 of us kids, but that was between Freshman and Sophomore year.
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Post by creativegirl on Apr 8, 2022 16:47:05 GMT
I don't remember being out by myself until I was a teenager(ish). I remember my mom dropping me off at the mall around then.
When I was 7 or 8, a little girl was abducted from my neighborhood when she was riding her bike to a friend's house and she has never been found. My family lived in a quiet, safe neighborhood and we would play out front with the neighbor kids often. Now that I'm a parent to young children, I can't imagine how much that situation must have worried my parents. I don't remember if they set different rules after that or not.
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