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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 seem to recall that free range parenting was heavily dunked, particularly by small-c conservative types, in the 90s as hippie bullshit where negligent parents were allowed to turn their kids into unsupervised, uncivilized little menaces that would go on to terrorize their fellow citizens without reprimand. Surely discourses of that sort were one factor why we've swung so heavily into the other extreme.
It might also contribute as much, if not more, than child safety concerns: free range parenting dismissed not so much due to the potential harm to child but the potential harm to the rest of the society. (Many fond memories of childhood spent outside on bikes without supervision often do include tales of mild or not-so-mild vandalism and other lawbreaking in it, after all.)
I don't really remember that. People didn't talk much about parenting in the 90s in Sweden and when things heated up at the end of the 90s and in the 00s all the negative discourse seemed to be about the opposite: "helicopter" and "curling" parenting.
Talk about parental neglect emerged later with "latte moms" and then more recently about parents using smart screens as a baby sitter. That mostly concerns babies and preschool aged children though and I don't think that is what people are talking about when they say "free range parenting"
Once again, everyone is forgetting Gen X 😁
Latchkey kids. The backlash to the (perception) of emotional and psychological neglect, not physical abuse. Parents who provided for their children's material needs but were literally or emotionally absent, distant, unengaged so the children were left to raise themselves.
This then led to calls for Something Must Be Done, which is where the legal repercussions for "unsupervised children" came in:
Look at the parents in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (a movie which I loathed the first time I saw it and continue to loath because I think Ferris is an absolute brat whom I would love to beat senseless). The kids there are in their late teens, almost adults, so there is not the same ramifications as allowing a set of twelve year olds to roam around the city without adult supervision. It also allows for his mother to leave him home alone when she believes him to be ill, because he's old enough to look after himself (his mother doesn't need to go out to work so it's not due to the family's socio-economic situation that she is absent). But look at the parents in their lives: the ones most closely associated are the authority figures such as the school principal, not their parents. Ferris' parents are benignly neglectful, easily fooled by their son (whom they don't know well enough to realise he's chronically truant from school). Cameron's parents, or at least the only one we hear of (his mother is conspicuous by absence of any reference) are malignly neglectful, his father being a figure of fear but also absent from his son's life. Sloane's parents seem to be so invisible, that Ferris simply dressing up in a bad disguise is enough to pass as her father when he's getting her out of school.
The movie ends with an alliance between the hitherto hostile siblings and Ferris' parents remaining in their state of happy ignorance. The entire plot relies on the assumption "your parents won't know because they're not around enough to be involved in your life and know what is going on with you". Ferris is cocky and unlikeable (to me anyway) and gets away with it because the one adult aware of his behaviour is rendered powerless to do anything about it. But a deeper reading would indicate Ferris is like this because of lack of parental involvement; the only one aware of what is going on and trying to hold him accountable is his older sister. His parents are kind fools, even though (presumably) they are successful adults in the world of work and society. They are unaware of what their son is really doing and in a way don't care enough to find out, maybe he pulls off stunts like this because at least if he's caught and they hold him accountable, they're active in his life. Ferris is still a child, or at least immature; his Big Plan to reset the car's odometer and keep Cameron's dad ignorant fails horribly. It's the first actual consequence to their actions that happens, and even though it's the catalyst for Cameron to confront his father, we never see the fall-out of that. So we're left with "Ferris had a great time and successfully got away with it all", and no follow-up on "but what happened to Cameron and Sloane?"
And since the movie is set in the week before they graduate high school, they'll all be going off to begin their adult lives, to be out of the family home, to formally separate from their parents, and there will never be that opportunity for them to be seen as who they are.
Oh, well: that was too deep for a fun movie very much of its time.
There's a term I haven't heard in a while. But I do remember hearing a lot about it in the early 90s, including, iirc, actual TV commercials denigrating it, presumably paid for by some kind of advocacy group.
The simple explanation is that they don’t exist anymore.
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