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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)
Once when my husband was playing with our toddler in our driveway, a police officer showed up saying someone had called about "an infant by the side of the road" at our address. He had been in physical contact with our kid the whole time...so now we joke that he's invisible. :D
Meanwhile, as a city kid I was allowed to cross the street at 3, walk 1/4 mile to the park at 4, walk generally around the neighborhood within about a half mile radius at 5, and ride the bus home from school as a latchkey kid at 6.
What first comes to my mind is the Five Children and It series--they had a governess but were allowed out on their own (weren't they?).
Then there's Understood Betsy, which...could be taken as a "city kids are starting to be less free-range, that's bad" novel from 100 years ago. (Though that's really an oversimplification. But for the purposes for this discussion...)
Then for American history, well, see the "Schoolhouse Blizzard" or "Children's Blizzard"--so named because it hit just when school was letting out, so many of the victims were children trying to get home from school. David Laskin's book about it argued that it made Great Plains settlers of the time (1888) conclude they had "trusted the land too much" or allowed children too much free range. (Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables are both set before this, in the 1870s; The Long Winter was 1880-81.)
IDK but I do know there's controversy in Girl Scouts over whether parents should be (a) allowed at or (b) required to be at Daisy meetings (K-1st), because some feel that kindergartners are too young to give a coherent account of what's happened to them so parents should always be there... Meanwhile, a constant source of angst in parenting groups is "What age is old enough to assume a party is drop-off rather than parents-attend?" This freaked me out when I first saw it because I'm old, I didn't know "parents-attend" was even a thing. (Remember in Beezus and Ramona (1955) where preschool Ramona invites neighborhood kids over for a party and they all get dropped off?)
This is actually a fascinating series because it actually happened and so can be presumed an accurate reflection of reality for at least a certain slice of the population. It's not just the Victorian equivalent of a soap opera. There's quite a bit of, well, values dissonance in Laura's childhood, too, and not just about the racial attitudes of the adults around her. Strict gender roles, teenagers grow up as fast as they damn well please but don't get to do it by half measures, fairly extreme forms of corporal punishment are normal and unremarked upon, dad rules over mom with no dispute, little to no age segregation, liberated women are viewed as unlikable and possibly insane, teenaged girls gossip about which adult bachelor they're going to marry and angle for their attention quite openly, etc, etc. There's a scene in one of the books in which teenaged boys physically exclude an unpopular teacher from school, and this is treated as normal, expected behavior that occasionally just happens. As long as boys learn to read and do arithmetic, it isn't particularly important whether they earn any formal credentials from their schooling.
The books take place in a time of very rapid change; they're a story of a family going from subsistence farming, to more comfortable subsistence farming, to commercial farming, with the daughter marrying a man in his twenties at 15 and becoming the wife of a commercial farmer. It deals with her early years as a married woman, including the infant mortality rate of the time, fading premodern social structures for labor allocation, etc. It touches on then-current social issues including temperance(Laura is in favor), women's suffrage(Laura is against, and doesn't understand why suffragettes are in favor), and immigration(she's undecided). The main character works two jobs- once, as a seamstress, there's a subtext that maybe her parents hope this will lead to her meeting men who are unmarried(otherwise why would they hire it out) and wealthy enough to hire it out, and then as a teacher, where she begins seeing Almanzo- because he obtains her father's permission to take her back and forth between the school she works at and her family home. Her mom isn't too happy about this but her dad thinks it's a great idea, and so she never even thinks to push back on it. There's social and technological change in the background; the Ingalls stop trying to outrun the expansion of the railroad in about the fourth book, set themselves up as commercial farmers, and eventually mechanize. In the first book Laura fantasizes about eating meat as a special treat. They get a sewing machine, ride on a train, and even buy their first refrigerated food. The books take place in the aftermath of the civil war, and figures from the civil war are mentioned in an offhand, recent-history ish way like people might talk about prominent early-2000's people today.
The books are worth reading just to see how people two lifetimes ago thought about the world.
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