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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)
It sounds like something omitted from your books is all the child labor. For most of human history, most of human labor was agricultural. Children grew up working alongside their parents, first through useless imitation ("play") and, as the years passed, through making small contributions, then large ones. Children qua children have been culturally loved and cherished to varying degrees depending on a host of factors, but only comparatively recently has childhood been idle. Everything really is childcare, when your work can be performed while you care for your children--and, as they grow, performed with your children. Well, in the 19th century we sort of collectively decided that child labor is bad, but was it bad because it was bad for children, or was it bad because it was exploitative? There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
I'm not sure what, if anything, that adds to your analysis, it just struck me as maybe worth noting.
Yeah, I don't think you can go to 19th century European literature for a read on this, because non-upper-class children didn't really have free time, they were supposed to be working. Even in Oliver Twist, it wasn't that the kids were wandering around getting into random mischief and menacing society -- that was their job!
Looking at Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Great Brain, non-farm kids in late 19th c. America seem to have much more like what we might think of as a free-range upbringing.
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Here, there are exceptions for kids working for their family's business (provided the family business does not employ 10 people or more), newspaper delivery, tutoring, babysitting or working for a nonprofit.
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Yeah, that's true. And, indeed, a lot of homeschool moms of daughters, especially, still do a lot of tasks that are sort of like labor -- they'll garden, sew, raise and milk goats, make dairy products, bake, and so on. I suppose Zvi and Scott didn't talk about it because apprenticing children as writers or psychiatrists wouldn't really happen until they're well into their late teens, and able to drive and be independent anyway.
There are plenty of cultures that never had that many free range girls, but did have a lot of obligatory embroidery, lacemaking, and whatnot. There appear to have been respectability arms races in the past with who could make the most elaborate clothing that might have been about as onerous as the current saftyism idleness race.
I do want to go to art markets with my kids when they're a bit older, make crafts, raise eggs and whatnot, especially since we have summers off.
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