Yes it is well written and the style is light and refreshing, but am I the only one who think this is horrific child abuse?
In the world I grew up in, I had to be home before the street lights came on. I had to "check in" periodically, but otherwise, lived an unfettered lifestyle. I was free to roam, and roam I did. My friends and I had a tree fort we'd built in the woods, pieced together from scrap wood we'd found, complete with a tire swing.
We swam in the streams, we biked full speed through wooded trails fraught with potholes, tree roots, fallen branches.
We scoured the neighborhood in larger and larger radii, exploring til we found danger, excitement, or boredom.
My daughter doesn't live in this world, and may never know it. My daughter lives in a world where Child Protective Services can pick her up for being seen without a parent. My daughter lives in a world where she can be detained for walking to her grandmother's house alone. My daughter lives in a world where building a tree fort could be construed as cause for arrest.
Maybe it's for the better. Maybe we should place safety above all else in our children's lives. Maybe our parents should all have been removed, and each of us would have been better cared for as wards of the state. I honestly don't know, but I know that in exploration, curiosity was fostered. I know that in roaming, I learned how to be self-sustaining; or at least as self-sustaining as a child can be expected to be.
I have kids now and while they aren't as old as I was when I started roaming the neighborhood it saddens me that I'm frightened to let them. Not because I'm worried someone will harm them and/or kidnap them, but because I'm worried someone will call the cops and CPS will come. That I will have a blip on a piece of paper(or electronic file these days) and that it could lead to court orders and in an extreme my kid taken away if only for a little while.
I know that the police have to do their job and if someone reports a kid wonder around they should respond. I just wish that they weren't forced to call CPS in every instance(they are required any time a minor is involved here), like they aren't capable of assessing a situation.
We live in a different world, but I don't believe it is any less safe than it was 20 years ago.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/14/t...
The question, of course, is whether or not that safety is attributable to our collective paranoia, or in spite of it.
The incidents in the story, really, aren't much different from a parent pushing their kids off on their first bike ride with no training wheels. Are they going to fall? Maybe. Are they going to die? Definitely not.
Kids often have overblown senses of danger. Did the river have alligators? Maybe, maybe not (I checked though, it does), but kids are often imagining dangers that aren't there. Old Lady Crenshaw isn't really a witch, and her house isn't really haunted, and Old Man Cratchett isn't likely to shoot trespassing children on sight.
My family frequently goes to Hawaii, and while it literally took weeks to convince my child that yeah, there are sharks in the ocean, but it's still safer than the car ride TO the beach. I don't feel even slightly guilty for trading out her fear of sharks for the wonderment that is the ocean. We discussed how to deal with sharks, what to do if we encounter one, blah blah blah, but at least to me, "avoiding the whole ocean forever" was not a valid way to deal with that fear.
Do you think alligators can't kill you?
Regardless, even though you quoted out of context, it's perhaps worth backpeddling a bit, because even though I stated that they're definitely not going to die while riding a bike, even that is an overstatement. It's clearly not impossible to die on one's maiden bike ride, though it is still very, very unlikely.
Pushing a kid on a bike without training wheels for the first time could very easily be interpreted as attempted murder by a precocious child. That doesn't mean that their fears are rational. Swimming in a river has a non-zero chance of alligator attack, statistically, alligator attacks are very, very rare, and you're far more likely to die of regular old drowning than by alligator.
Crossing a road or taking a car ride is likely more dangerous.
Please be careful to not fall into the fear trap. Safety-nuts are afraid about rare "worst case" scenarios where a child is harmed. And then safety-nut-critics get themselves scared about rare cases where CPS or police are called a child playing alone.
Just go ahead and let your kid be a kid.
IMHO, within that envelope there's plenty of room to find a tribute to living life, rather than letting fears govern our fate.
Yeah, it was another time, when you were overprotectivily cuddled 24/7, and people had fun and adventures in nature even when they were kids.
I also think we as a society have become too protective of children. The ones that are protected from everything that could possibly hurt them usually grow up not having the curiosity and gall to put themselves in uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_alligator_attacks...
There had been a grand total of 4 fatal alligator attacks in the USA in the 1980's. It seems to me that the father probably realized that there wasn't actually much danger involved for his boys.
And I think your proposed scenario
> Would it be equally character-building to make them run across a freeway to find a dropped pair of sunglasses?
is a little disproportionate, risk-wise: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809-456.pdf "Pedestrian fatalities from all crashes reached a low of 4,763 fatalities in 2000"
You're absolutely right. But what is "close?" An alligator swimming right alongside the boat? Sure, that's definitely too close. But what about an alligator on the riverbank, 100 yards away? Is that still too close? How about half a mile downstream? Again, I've never lived near gators, so I don't have an intuition on what is and is not a dangerous situation.
Additionally, I feel like you're forgetting that oft-repeated (and generally true!) maxim: "They're more afraid of you than you are of them."
Maybe the father in the story was being outrageously irresponsible. My gut tells me (and the story seems to intimate) that he knew what he was doing. That is, he probably intuited that the situation was low-risk.
To use a different dangerous animal, people have been killed by grizzly bears, yet tens of hundreds of thousands of folks annually camp out in the backcountry. Are they being irresponsible, just because their is a risk involved?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn-JNkpG89U
I have been to the Okefenokee, and canoed and camped there. The gators are intimidating, but they really never did seem aggressive at all. They're literally all over, and at the visitor center area they can be quite close to the tourists, with no barriers. I was a lot more worried about snakes, really.
Having said all that, I wouldn't put a kid in the water near one I could see. Why risk it? Rumored giant catfish, though, sure, why not? ;-)