The girls are off the reservation

[pegkerr]

The girls are walking to a neighborhood coffeeshop, four blocks away, with a neighbor girl, aged eight. Fiona is eleven and Delia is eight.

This is the first time they have been allowed off the block by themselves. I sigh when I think of my own childhood, and Rob feels wistful about this, too. We were both allowed to roam pretty much where we liked, on foot or on bikes, at Fiona's age. But we have been cautious. We do live in a pretty good neighborhood. I suppose there are those of you out there who might be appalled we have waited so long, while others gasp at our boldness in letting them take this little jaunt. Who knows what is best? It's so hard to know how much freedom to allow them, but we have to start allowing them to try their wings, we know.

Argh. This is hard. Was it this hard for my parents?

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

We were always a lot more willing to let the kids go further if there was a small group of them. Three is a good number.

Was it as hard for your parents (or mine) to let us off the block or out of the neighborhood? Probably not. It isn't that bad things didn't happen back then; our parents just didn't hear about all of them, from all over the country, day after day, on the evening news. But I think it has always been hard for parents to watch their kids take those steps away.

I think I mentioned in LJ that B is going to Vietnam this winter . . . then I remember that when my own mother said that her son was going to Vietnam, it meant something entirely different.

[beadslut.livejournal.com]

Ah, Saturday afternoons, the 5 block walk to the movies. The mile, crossing two busy Chicago streets to the library.

I remember the first time I dropped the boy and his friends off at the movie theater and went somewhere else for a couple of hours. It was all I could do not to sneak in after, just to keep an eye on them.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, I am happy to be able to say they have already returned safely, so the first experiment went well. *Whew*

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I was about to ask if they were back yet.

[ame-chan.livejournal.com]

I hear you. My kids do not go out to play on our block, as it is a less than stellar neighborhood between two major streets.

I just this year began allowing my 10 year old to walk from school to the library (about 5 blocks) after school, and she likes to stop at a local coffeeshop on the way. It was hard to let her go, but she's done pretty well so far. The 13 year old roams all over town, but she too was not allowed that kind of freedom until she was around 10 or 11. It's not the same world that it was. Our kids don't have the same freedoms. It's hard to know what information to compensate with, so they're prepared and independent. It's hard to know when to let them go safely.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Even leaving aside the larger world, I know that our future kids will probably not have the kind of neighborhood I had as a kid, because most people my age didn't. When I got a nosebleed when I was selling Girl Scout cookies at Delia's age, I knew exactly whose house to rush to on that block to get help. I had a mental map of which adults were my parents' friends and which adults were my friends' parents and who would be home during the day (because they didn't work outside the home or because they worked night shifts and, from that, how annoyed they would likely be by a small girl standing on their doorstep). It was very much a community in ways that the next neighborhood over, with nearly identical houses, demographics, and street design, was not. I'm not sure how these things happen, but I do know I won't be able to count on them happening for us in the future.

I was babysitting at 11. Various people have expressed surprise at that, but I was the oldest kid in our (new) neighborhood, and I looked much older than 11, so even though I told people my age, they still reflexively treated me as mature and responsible. And I had a very easy first babysitting job, sweet conscientious little girls of 7 and 4 with a 5-month-old baby brother, living next door so that I could call my mom if I got into a jam. I wouldn't call my 11-year-old cousin to babysit if I had to find someone a babysitter tomorrow, though.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I started babysitting at 11 too. Of course, I was also in Girl Scouts and had a bazillion first aid and CPR courses under my belt already. :)

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

The world changes, really it does.

I grew up in small town Ohio (*really* small town Ohio) and we didn't lock our doors at night, and I remember more than once as a teenager when we'd leave the keys in the car and the car running and the doors unlocked if we were 'just going to drop in at the post office for five minutes'.

I pretty much had free run of the town from the time I was seven or eight, biking the mile and a half *all the way to the other side of town limits* to get to the library. I walked the mile and a half to school by myself from age 10 on out. I started babysitting younger kids when I was 8 (and getting paid 25 cents an hour for it, too).

But this isn't small town Ohio in the 70's and 80's. This is a big city, and I'm glad you waited. From what I understand, Fiona's a very responsible older sister, and if there are three children in the group, and they all stick together, and it's a good neighborhood, I think they'll be fine.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You probably don't want to know that I was taking the New York City subway to school, alone, when I was twelve.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Ask me about the mom in the 60s who used to send her kids to the store, 3 blocks away, to by milk. Kids ages? 2, 3 and 4.

K.

[tinymich.livejournal.com]

My mum's told me a few times before that she and my aunt, the second-oldest and oldest daughters respectively, used to be responsible for doing all the grocery shopping for the family in the mornings before school so their mother (my grandma) could sleep in. They were 8 and 6 years old.

Traveling Kids

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Somewhere around here I have a copy of my paternal grandmother's diary from the late 30's. In one of the latter entries she mentions that my uncle John, who might have been all of 12 or 13 years old at the time, was going of with my grandfather (who was a traveling repairman) on a working trip for a week or so. The was an epidemic of "sleeping sickness", and she wrote how worried he was that "Johnny" might get exposed. So I guess, yeah, it was always a tough world to raise children, and parents always worried.

Ironically, a few weeks later she was dead of the same disease, and her funeral was quarantined.