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Seriously, the amount of helicopter parenting in this country is ridiculous. 21 year old men at my top ranked engineering school had their mothers checking their school emails for homework (I'm not making this up).

Another story: kid OD on drugs, his mom flew across the country to be by his bedside and paid the school from getting suspended

Another Story: child is depressed because he got a low first exam grade os his parents sent him to Europe to a GPA booster school for a semester to "cheer him up"

These kids are ridiculous their parents coddle them through everything and clap joyously and the slightest acheivement which they totally positioned them for.

They are depressed and completely incapable of navigating the real world. I had to break up with the one I dated because he wanted me to be his mom. Like no kid, I have a life to live do your own laundry and no I'm not going to redo your resume for you and get you a job.

This has GOT to stop. Below is an article from the Former Dean of Stanford on just this very topic: It's embarassing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2015/10/16/...

About that first example... showing up at your child's bedside when they're in hospital doesn't sound particularly helicopter-y.

If the child was low-key sick, sure, that'd be silly -- a stomach bug or flu keeping you in bed for the weekend doesn't warrant cross-country flights. But a drug overdose? That's a serious health issue.

More to the point, someone who just ODed on drugs might very well need some therapy or even an intervention. The hospital is just going to toss him out on the street once he can walk on his own again and whomever his friends are at school they probably aren't helping. If the parent doesn't go over there and intervene there is a very high chance he will end up in the hospital or the morgue shortly afterward.

I'm with you. If a kid has to go to the hospital from a drug overdose, I hope their parent cares enough to go an support them.

I taught an introductory computing course for incoming freshman while I was at university. I once had a student's mother call the department head to complain about her child's grades and the "needless difficulty" of the class.

Fortunately, my boss was[1] fantastic and told that parent to piss off, not-quite-politely explaining that her son is now a grown-ass man, and that if he weren't doing well in the course then it was his own damn fault, and that it's pretty pathetic that as an adult, he was still having his mother fight his battles for him, and furthermore pathetic that his mother was complicit in such. She also put a few kind words toward my abilities as a teacher, which had me feeling pretty chuffed ;)

Seriously, that class was quite likely the single easiest course required by the college of engineering, and anyone who failed it was either too lazy to do the work or they simply didn't have what it takes to be an engineer (either way, most of the failures wound up dropping out of the college of engineering within a year or two; a few came back ready to take it more seriously in round two; one of my students took my class three times, and he failed every time, finally dropping out of engineering after three semesters).

All in all, it was pretty sad.

[1]: She's still fantastic, though she's no longer my boss :)

As a lifelong resident of a midwestern state in the US, I think it's less a matter of independence and more a matter of safety and legal issues. I too made plenty of solo excursions through our rural countryside at a young age.

On the other hand, in major cities, parents are being charged with neglect if their young children walk a a few blocks up the street to go to a park. Not everywhere, but such stories crop up in the news every so often.

Another part of the problem is that communities in America aren't (or seem to not be) quite as tight knit as they once were. There are plenty of explanations, from cultural shifts, family policy, excessively punitive drug policy, economic policy, decline of religion, decline of moral values, rise of the internet and easy access to excessive amounts of televised programming, cell phones and handheld video games, you name it, and someone has probably blamed something for it.

Your talking about fear not actual danger. Crime statistics are very much down from the 1950's. As are playground accidents and automobile fatalities..

The most important thing to remember about lawn darts is not that handing kids metal stakes is dangerous and stupid, but relatively few kids where actually harmed.

Your talking about fear not actual danger. Crime statistics are very much down from the 1950's. As are playground accidents and automobile fatalities..

It's not necessarily fear, from the parents, of actual danger, it's fear of being charged with neglect. It, too, may be an unfounded fear, but until being a busybody who needless charges someone with neglect is a crime, crime and accident statistics don't necessarily enter into it.

>On the other hand, in major cities

I think you mean in suburbs. I live in New York and see kids alone all the time. I've even asked a 10 year old for directions.

Definitely agree with this. I grew up rural and was pretty independent by middle school with a broad network of older friends and friends parents to get me rides around the county.

I have friends raising kids in inner city areas, both gentrified and not, and they are all about getting those kids navigating the city blocks around their homes by eight or nine.

I realize those are anecdotes, but suburbs have been repeatedly indicted for a lot of the post-Baby Boomer social issues. Thus, I'm hardly surprised. Suburbs were a massive mistake: fiscally, socially, and environmentally. We're only now really uncovering the entirety of the negative impacts this sort of development had on the United States.

Depends on the suburb, too— I grew up in a prewar streetcar suburb where all the kids walked to school in the 90s (although there weren't really corner stores that kids went down to for milk or whatever). More 'modern' suburbs are designed to only be navigable by a car, and getting to most destinations involves crossing huge deadly arterial roads.

I saw two 10yr old girls on a sushi date here in NYC by themselves. Table full of sushi, eating with chopsticks and catching up with mature conversations. The children here generally seem very independent and well adjusted.

Exactly. I am a parent and even though rationally I want my kid to be independent and I know the world is fairly safe, the media has made me terrified at the prospect of letting my kid interact with strangers unsupervised. I just cannot shake that fear.

Air conditioning. I'm in the south and central air made it where nobody goes out and sits on their porch and socializes any more. Nobody is forced to meet their neighbors anymore.

> In America however it is simply sad how dependent children are on their parents. Parents take them to every sort of activity and thing they got to do. In so many American cities you can't have a life without a car. There is nothing to do without a car.

That's hardly the parents' fault though. In many American cities it's literally a life-threatening journey for a 6-year-old to try to navigate along a road that has no sidewalk, with cars zooming by at 45mph. And then a kid comes to a 6-lane intersection that he needs to cross. With drivers turning right on red and generally not used to any pedestrians at all.

It's a life-threatening journey for a 36-year-old, too. Those roadways aren't intended to be walked.

> This isn't so much the Japanese being weird and different as the American's being the odd ones.

German, confirming.

What I fear is, that like many other cultural things, this will eventually make it's way over the Atlantic and, when I have kids, I will be forced to do this to them, too.

It's already happening judging from my friends in Germany who have kids.

Seconded. I'm not Norwegian but I've been living in Norway for 30 years and my children grew up just like that. Of course they were in fact dependent on me for transport to sports events (handball, archery) but these were often more than 100km round trips, just impractical with public transport (too many changes of bus and train) and anyway we would take turns driving a car full not just our own children.

As for school trips, one thing stands out, compared to the UK at least, and that is that they were expected to take a knife with them. Can't sharpen a stick to hold a sausage over a fire otherwise.

And yet, the least car-dependent areas of the US (Manhattan, downtown SF, downtown Chicago) are where it'd be least appropriate to let a child wander alone.

It's all fun and games until someone gets kidnapped.

There's also the situation where a lot of American towns/cities aren't so crowded that you can walk everywhere. And not everywhere in America is there good public transportation.

> It's all fun and games until someone gets kidnapped.

But statistically, how often does that happen? Is it enough to be seriously worried about?

> There's also the situation where a lot of American towns/cities aren't so crowded that you can walk everywhere. And not everywhere in America is there good public transportation.

I don't think it's an issue of being crowded. I think it's an issue of how we design our cities. We assume everyone will have a car, so those that don't have a car (kids) have less independence. A lot of Europe was built before cars existed, so they don't assume that everyone will have their own car.

There are 115 abductions of children by strangers in an average year, in the US.

Traffic accidents are a much, much more prevalent threat.

(There are 800,000 children reported missing each year. 90% have misunderstood directions or ran away on their own initiative. 9% are kidnapped by a family member in a custody dispute.

http://www.pollyklaas.org/about/national-child-kidnapping.ht... )

> And not everywhere in America is there good public transportation.

First off, that's by design. Car-centric infrastructure planning really did a number on the American public. The damages ended up being far worse than just economic.

Second, that's an understatement of the century. Public transportation is pretty much non-existent in most of US. It's good in exactly 1 city (NY), and probably decent in another 2 or 3.

I bet more parents beat their kids to death each year than strangers kidnapping children. Based on that parents should not be allowed to get close to their children.

Almost all kid kidnappings are from someone the kid knows, like a parent without legal custody.