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Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood. If you are a safety first society and prevent kids from doing anything dangerous or going out on their own, they never learn to navigate that. If the kid is never allowed out of sight of an adult, he can’t learn how to navigate without an adult. If you never allow them to cook, they’ll never learn to do so.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
Yeah it's like if you're gonna create an environment where kids can never get served by better dancers, then you're not giving them any reason to get funky. May as well tear down the community center and make it a strip mall at that point.
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