• spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
    281·
    10 months ago

    Normal World: Children become autonomous early on in their development and are able to travel relatively short-to-medium distances without the need of a chaperone.

    American World: Children are forbidden from venturing 2 feet into the outside world without a pair of 21 Year-old eyes oogling them at all times. Travel of children autonomously under the age of 16 is forbidden. Any concerns about a child’s development are swiftly hand waved away because the mystical child-stealing candy van might drive on by and snatch your obviously stupid and oblivious child. Anyway, don’t forget to go to church!

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      and it’s not parents fault for the most part. Most parents want their kids to have freedom and autonomy, but it’s now seen as child endangerment to do this. The law and paranoid fox news watching neighbors who report kids for their ‘safety’ are the problem.

    • TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world
      3·
      10 months ago

      I feel like less of a helicopter parent now, thank you.

      My kids have had to make me realize they should be independent in certain things a few times and I always feel bad for overstepping, but it’s hard not to when bad drivers, school shooters and random terrible shit are shoved in our faces all the time. We’ve been programmed to be afraid and it is really hard to not be in our current world of media, internet, and seemingly neverending hatred.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    5·
    10 months ago

    Back when I was a toddler and my brother not much older, my parents were visiting relatives across town and so we were home alone for a bit.

    I think, I missed my mommy or something. It must have been not enough of an emergency for us to call at our relatives.
    Instead, we took the logical not-an-energency step, which is to say many, many steps, because we decided to walk across town to our relatives.

    It’s a 20 minute walk with adult feet, so I imagine, it would have taken us at least twice as long.

    And so many things could have gone wrong. From us just being barefoot, to someone calling the police, to our parents driving home in the meantime not knowing where we were, to just straight up kidnapping.

    But not this time. We just rang at our relatives’ door out of the blue, with our parents still there. 🙃

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        7·
        10 months ago

        I don’t personally remember this whole story, obviously, but I can’t imagine how else we could’ve just walked out. I guess, another possibility would be that only our mom was visiting the relatives and our dad was taking a mighty nap.

        But well, my brother and I were apparently always well-behaved children. And we could’ve always phoned them, or rang at the door of an older lady living in the same house, or walked two streets over to our grandparents or three streets over to friends of the family.

        Evidently, we even knew how to walk to our relatives across town, so I do feel like that would have been enough of a support network and at least my brother old enough, so that one could start trying to leave us home alone. You do have to start at some point…

  • technomad@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    Was it actually in the snow though? The accompanying picture makes it seem way more dangerous.