Like most of you, we recently finished the Stranger Things series, as did our adult kids, which prompted them to ask “Did kids in the 80s really have this much freedom and independence?” And as most of you know firsthand, yes, we sure did. We rode our bikes until the street lights came on, as every Gen X person will tell you. We drank from the garden hose. I walked from my house to my friend’s house 3 miles away on a frozen pond when I was 11 or 12. We swam in a quarry that had submerged buildings (that blew in during a hurricane) just under the surface. I used to take a paperback book and climb one of our walnut trees and read for hours in the crook of a limb, twenty or thirty feet above the ground.
My second child once heard us talking about climbing trees and said “You climbed a tree?!” like we had just admitted to skydiving without a parachute. I’m not sure where this anxiety started, but all my kids viewed their independence differently than I did. Once I left my wallet at the grocery store a mile from home, and I told my 11 year old that he was in charge of his two siblings (7 and 4 years old) for the ten minutes I’d be gone. When I returned, all the lights were out, and they were huddled under the kitchen table with an assortment of utensils as weapons as if they were in Home Alone, ready to do battle with anyone who came in the house to get them. I don’t know where that anxiety came from, but it wasn’t me. My mom started driving cars at age 13. I couldn’t wait to turn 16 to get my license. Many of my kids’ friends didn’t want to get their license until they were out of high school.
You’ll probably remember the ads that came on after the nightly news that asked parents “It’s 10PM. Do you know where your children are?” And honestly, they didn’t all know. Now, were kids also probably in actual peril more than they are now? Sure. CPS intervention was rare. I knew a lot of kids who were abused at home; staying out of sight of an abusive parent, even if that meant being unsupervised away from home, might have been a safer option for that kid. There were bullies at school who would beat kids up, although there was a Fight Club in my daughter’s high school in the late 2010s. I guess you could say the Fight Club is consensual at least.
I don’t think this benign neglect was a bad thing for us, although you could also say that I would say that because I survived. The kids that didn’t survive can’t talk about how they survived. I had a sister who was hit by a car when she was very little (5 or 6), walking back from the candy store with friends (but no adults). A friend came running to our house and told my mom “She’s been hit by a car! I don’t think she’s dead yet!” (She was not actually injured, just barely brushed by the car and fell down, and the car didn’t stop). Several of us experienced perverts in public spaces, being grabbed or groped, or seeing someone expose himself. Another sister had a school teacher follow her as she walked home and threaten her and her friend (they told on her for racist bullying of a student).
If you want a truly horrifying example of parents giving kids too much independence, look no further than the story of Grace Budd who was 10 years old in 1928 when a relative stranger to the family using an assumed name claimed he had to go to his niece’s birthday party, and then offered to bring their daughter Grace along. They said that sounded dandy, and he then took her to a farmhouse where he strangled, decapitated, and then ate her over the next few days.
But somewhere between letting a stranger take your 10 year old for the day, and 18 year olds who have never used a paring knife, there has to be a sane middle ground. It’s no wonder nobody wants to be a parent anymore. It’s a full time supervisory job and the stakes (like climbing a tree) are life and death!
There is a beloved Japanese reality TV show called Old Enough! that has been airing since 1991. In this show, children aged 2-5 are given a task, like going to the store to get something. The premise is that this is the first time the child is doing this activity. This used to be much more normalized.
So what’s changed? Let’s compare some of the parenting norms from my generation (Gen X) and the current situation parents face.
Parental Accountability
- Then (Gen X). Parents were judged socially, not institutionally. Police and neighbors handled minor issues informally. CPS intervention was rare and only in extreme cases.
- Now. Parenting is legally scrutinized. A single bystander with idiosyncratic expectations can trigger CPS involvement, and an accusation is likely to be taken seriously. Schools, doctors and neighbors are mandated reporters, vigilant for any parenting failure that they personally find suspicious or concerning.
Parents must be as concerned with protecting themselves from insititutional consequences as they are with protecting kids. This makes parents behave defensively.
Media
- Then (Gen X). Parents watched local news on one evening broadcast and had limited awareness of the rare tragedies that can occur.
- Now. Parents live inside 24×7 news cycles in which crime stories can go viral. Algorithms amplify the worst case scenarios.
Humans are very bad at probabilistic thinking when confronted with emotional stories. Even if a story is unlikely, when you hear about a true crime involving a child, you immediately imagine that it could be your own child.
Identity
- Then (Gen X). Being a parent was the norm, and it was just one role among many that adults played. Kids lived in a world designed for adults.
- Now. Parenting is a choice and for those who chose it, it’s a core part of their moral identity. Children are viewed as emotionally fragile projects. Parenting mistakes feel like moral failures. Parents fear being judged as negligent or uncaring. They are constantly focused on optimizing their parenting skills to meet the demands of this core role they perform.
Collective Trust
- Then (Gen X). Neighbors knew each other. Adults corrected bad child behavior collectively. Children were “known” in public spaces. Parents trusted other adults, even when they shouldn’t.
- Now. People don’t know their neighbors. Public correction of someone else’s child is unacceptable and inappropriate. Adults avoid involvement for legal reasons. Neighborhood trust is lower, so a concerned adult might resort to calling CPS rather than having a difficult or unwelcome conversation with the parent. Parents no longer trust strangers, insitutions or each other, so they compensate with surveillance.
Schools
Even if Gen X parents wanted to foster the familiar independence in their kids that they enjoyed, modern institutions train dependence through things like:
- Zero-tolerance policies
- Hyper-safety rules
- Reduced unstructured play
- Constant adult mediation of conflict
Class Pressure
Middle and upper-middle class parents especially believe that:
- Childhood is determinative
- Failure is permanent
- Competition is intense
Like the stereotypical “tiger parents,” they oversupervise their kids to ensure success which actually leads to less success as kids fear the loss of a parental safety net.
In William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, a group of British schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. After a brief attempt to organize themselves democratically, they devolve into violence and anarchy. The message of the novel is that civilization is a thin veneer; remove the structure and humans will revert to tribal violence. It’s bleak.
But it’s not true!
In 1965, six Tongan boys were shipwrecked on a remote island for 15 months. They cooperated, created a shared garden, created a rotating chore schedule, resolved conflicts with “time outs,” cared for the injured collectively, and survived through teamwork. This is a complete contradiction to Golding’s novel. There are other examples from reality, and in general, the outcomes were positive and cooperative. It has likewise been observed that children engaging in unstructured play with peers often create their own rules that foster safety, cooperation, and enjoyment–and those rules are less intrusive than the ones created by adults.
In 2018, Utah was the first state to introduce the first “free-range parenting” law. It stipulates that parents are not considered neglectful for allowing children to engage in independent activities such as walking to school, playing outside, or being home alone. The law does not set fixed ages for these activities which means it is still up to interpretation, but it is designed to move away from the increased triggering of CPS involvement that has become the trend. Since then 11 more states have followed suit, introducing “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws. This doesn’t appear to be a partisan issue as the states that have adopted these laws represent both Democratic and Republican leadership.
I’m sure there’s some generational bias going on, but I keep thinking that if we want the current generation to embrace parenting, then parenting needs to not suck. It needs to be just one of many roles in your life. Parents and kids both need a little more independence from each other in the process, like they did back in the 80s. But also let’s not beat and perv on those kids like people did back then. Some progress is good.
- Have you seen these issues with parenting in your community?
- Do you think having a Mormon community makes parenting easier because of higher levels of trust?
- Did you have more independence as a child than your kids did? Why did it change?
- What ages did you do independent activities like walking to school (or the bus stop), going to the store, playing outside, or being home alone? Was this the same for your kids or were they older?
- What do you think of Reasonable Childhood Independence laws? Are you concerned about the downside (e.g. abusive parents going unchecked)?
- Have you encountered “gentle parenting” or other new trends? What do you think of these approaches?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
“Parents must be as concerned with protecting themselves from institutional consequences as they are with protecting kids.”
THIS is my biggest concern. And what anecdotally leads to a lot of my peers (and myself) taking more precautions than perhaps even we would want. Though, as a caveat, chances are that to your other point, the number of instances where parents get CPS called on them are likely subject to the same faults in probabilistic thinking. But there IS the chance of having to endure that hell of suspicion.
We’ve tried to encourage our kids to do things independently, but sadly here in the burbs when none of the other parents in the neighborhood do? It results in my kids having nothing TO do when out on their own outside – besides shuttle to another house and hole up with their friends there with more generous screen time rules (aka no limits at all).
I suppose it’s just another algorithm manipulating me, but I swear I’m starting to see a lot more articles from actual news sources documenting the issues coming for us due to the helicopter parenting styles of the past 20 years.
I think I commented on a different post about the false equivalence of the Tongan boys and Golding’s novel. The Tongan boys are a self-selected group who had chosen to run away together. This is a very different situation to that in the novel where the boys find themselves stranded and thrown together by circumstance.
I did have more independence as a child. As the eldest of 7 children, I was expected to walk between my junior (ages 7-10) school and home (a couple of blocks away), as did many of the kids. The mothers were taking younger siblings to the infant school (5-6) in a completely different direction. However, whilst some kids were allowed to play out in the street, my parents didn’t allow us to do that. I’ve a feeling there may have been some kind of church teaching against the practice. The closest we got was getting specific permission to cycle or roller skate around the block. Ages 9-10 my sister and I were allowed to walk quite a distance to the nearest pool to go swimming. Though we did get into trouble when a friend’s father stopped to pick us up, and brought us back, as he was driving my friend to the pool and back at the same time. It was difficult negotiating what my parents’ boundaries were, in their absence. My friends father wasn’t a stranger after all (although my parents didn’t really know him) and my friend was there, and it was obvious the pool was the destination, given where they stopped to pick us up. I was frequently left in charge of younger siblings when my mother went to get groceries during the school holidays, and I hated it. It was particularly stressful when someone was knocking on the door, because we were not allowed to answer it.
Not going to get into the questions but just wanted to note that I thought this was an excellent analysis of the distinctions between “now” and “then” and enjoyed reading it very much. Thanks for this!!
I began formation in July of 1959, came off the assembly line in April of 1960 and was brought home to West Covina, Ca. We had free range as kids, if you watch the movie “Sandlot,” that was us. By 1968, my best friend and I on a Saturday morning would get on our bikes and ride down Lark Ellen Ave and cross “the 10” on a footbridge and go to an auto parts shop and bug the guy for a sticker. STP, Hooker Headers, Clay Smith Cams (cigar smoking woody woodpecker) were the best and adorned the banana seats on our Schwinns. We would then go to the Honda dealer and sit on the little dirt bikes, SL70s, until the salesman would run us off. A trip to the “headshop” was a must where it smelled of incense, patchouli and burning candles. We would go into the “blacklight room” and sit in the beanbag chairs and look at the blacklight posters. To do so, we had to buy something. 2 sticks of incense cost a nickel and we would go in on it together. In the summer after dinner, we would play “ditch” outside with our friends, a sort of team hide and go seek. On numerous occasions we would see night rocket launches from Vandenburg AFB while swimming or playing ditch. My dad put a pool in our backyard in 1964. Kids from the neighborhood swam with us all summer, provided my mom knew their mom.
Dad was a big time skier, having raced in Europe in the 50s and a ski instructor and patrolman all over California. I severely broke my leg skiing as an 8 year old and was in a cast for almost 5 months.
Miss College was my third grade teacher, and she signed each new cast. She was the quintessential “60s babe.” She wore shorts skirts, go-go boots, bouffant hairdo, the 60s style makeup…..the works! ….And to top it off, she drove a 63 split window black Corvette Stingray! We were never late for school, because we wanted to see her drive up in that car and then watch her get out of it! Think “Squints” and Wendy Peffercorn from “Sandlot.” There was ALWAYs a couple kids in a cast at elementary school. It was my turn. You rarely see a kid in a cast these days. Whenever I see a kid with one, I go out of my way to ask em about it, and if it was from doing something a kid should be doing, I tell em they are awesome! My wife and I raised our kids the same way. When they were very young, we lived on USAF bases so safety was not much of an issue. Later as grade schoolers they wandered our neighborhood with their friends. We loved having all the kids at our house and many Saturday mornings were spent feeding numerous kids breakfast from the “sleepover” in our family room. Our kids friends would literally walk in the front door and go straight to the fridge or the ziplock bag of cookies and help themselves.
Just my perspective of raising kids. My youngest is 34, my grand daughter is nine, the age I was crossing “the 10” on my Saturday adventures. I’m glad I got to do those things as a kid, I suck at video games unless it’s a full motion 180 degree screen aircraft simulator. That was fun for me to write down, I hope I didn’t bore too many of you….
Cheers Friends
My kids got almost the same freedom that I got, but then as a boomer, my kids are GenX. Parents were starting to realize that there *are* dangers. So, as a parent, I did look at my childhood and say, no way are my kids playing on farm machinery like tricky bars. It was the sharp disks of the harrow that did that. But, I will admit that my parents crossed the line at times into neglect. At 5 I was a latch key kid and cooked my own lunch the days my mother worked. Quite illegal now, and stupid then. And for sure my parents were abusive.
One other thing that has changed is that children are no longer “dime a dozen.” One thing about boomers is that there were so many of us that we were treated as replaceable. We were never individuals, but always part of a herd. Schools suddenly got way over crowded, and so class size of 35-40 kids was not unheard of. We were not taught so much as we were herded through the system.
Now children are so valuable, irreplaceable. Because when you have one or two instead of six or eight, it makes a big difference in how you treat your individual child. Back when boomers were born, children were hard to prevent, even so most of us boomers were accidents that our parents did not want. Family planning was not really “planning” because before the pill, babies happened even if you tried to prevent it. Of my siblings, the first two were way too close and the rest of us were unwanted accidents.
So, really, most of us were unwanted. Take that and chew on it a bit when you think about how our overworked and pregnant mothers took care of us.
House keeping was also not what it is today. My mother made all of our clothing except the boy’s Levies. Home canning was a must. Gardening was pretty much the only way we ate. And clothing all needed to be ironed. Most women today do none of those things. There was a “law” my mother joked about called “housework expands to fill the time available.” So, when the microwave came out, she said, watch how what we are expected to cook get more complicated. And it did. So, mothers today are expected to drive kids everywhere, do everything for them, and watch them constantly, because all the other jobs have gotten easier with washers, dryers, microwaves, dishwashers. So, a mother’s job has gone from all the real work my mother did, to hovering over her two children.
What Adam F said.
We FINALLY have found some fellow free range parents that let their kids play without micromanaging the entire production and it’s been so fun watching my kids live like it’s 1988. And unlike 1988 we don’t have to wait for street lamps to come on as there is usually someone in the group with a device we can text to come home. If our youngest isn’t going to a friends house but is going on a bike ride, we stick an AirTag in his sock =).
Re driving, we told our oldest two kids they can hate driving and they don’t have to drive, but 16 is the age appropriate time to learn the skill and we expect them to get a license even if they don’t use it. Both of them were licensed on their 16th birthday. Our oldest didn’t drive much the first 18 months but now drives a few days a week. Our second child drives any day a car is available. Hoping this tactic works with our younger two.
Travel club sports has done more to ruin childhood in my opinion than the 24-hour fearmongering news cycle. Kids are never around to make friends that actually live nearby. We stop our kids at pre-club and tell them their travel club sport experience will be joining the high school team where they can actually be on a team with their community members. It’s probably an unpopular opinion but I come by it honestly.
and in the 50s, we had even more independence! There were very few school buses, yet parents rarely drove kids to school. We had motor scooters at age 14!
No joke. Only time I was ever actually able to impress my kids to the point where one of them literally dropped their fork at the dinner table in shock was when I was talking about my childhood and casually mentioned I had 4 treehouses in my backyard (it was a big backyard with just forest behind it). One of them was a 5 story treehouse. It was normal to me. Shocking to them!
I wonder if family size plays a role here. I have 2 children, and I have 11 siblings. That is two very different childhood experiences.
There’s plenty of parental anxiety that is rooted more in the perception of risk rather than real risk, but I wonder if some things have actually become riskier over time. In my early teens, my parents didn’t have time to drive me to things all the time, so I discovered my ticket to freedom was a bicycle. I rode everywhere for years, even after I got my drivers license. I’m still a cyclist now, but I probably wouldn’t ride on some of the roads I didn’t think twice about riding on as a teenager. Part of that is being older and more cautious, but part of that is smartphones, which have introduced a new distraction to drivers and made roads more dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians.
I was born in New Guinea in 1948. The only doctor nearby was an on an American military base left over from the war. Most of the military had left and parked their Jeeps and left them for jungle to grow over them. My father had reclaimed one and got it going. Between our home and the doctor was a crocks infested river crossed by a rope suspension bridge built by the locals, that the Jeep could cross.
So my first adventure as a child was getting home over the rope bridge not certified to carry us.
After 18 months we returned to Australia where my father was a cabinet maker/carpenter. He had his workshop under the house where I played in the sawdust around the table saws and planers. I have industrial deafness from the equipment.Before primary school my father made me a Billy cart with wooden wheels. Our house was on a steep block about 50 yards deep, and then 20 yards of bush to a tidal creek.
I built a roof on the Billy cart but it would tip over if not going straight down the hill. There was quicksand in places by the creek.
When I started primary school I got a bicycle with 10inch wheels. The school was on the other side of town which was a tourist resort.
I remember being shot in the ear with an arrow by a boy at the other end of our street.
My daughters were still able To go off to the local town, when they were pre teens(about a mile, and beside a lake. And go to catch the bus to school by themselves.
Not sure about grand children (I think they went to school by themselves)and great grand children. Perhaps this is an American thing.
“Adults corrected bad child behavior collectively”
I don’t hesitate to do this. Nieces and nephews running amok? I correct them and I don’t care what their parents think. But I do realize that the norm in this regard has changed.
That said, though, I have an 11 and 7 year old. I’m an anxious parent. The biggest battle is with screen time, which I allow very little of. We play instruments, sports, and legos. I’m blessed with lots of free time to entertain them. I feel that screens have sucked the life, and even literal physical and mental health, out of youth. The high school kids of today just don’t seem as fit or mentally and emotionally able and stable as the kids of the past. Lots of obesity, video game addiction, and lack of communication skills, and depression. I want to steer my boys away from that. Stay active. Stay sharp. Be friendly. Have lots of face-to-face contact. Knock on neighbor kids doors to play outside.
I went to LA to help my daughter while she was in “tech week” at the theater she worked at. My job was to take my granddaughter to various activities and watch her at home. After a full day at gymnastics, the zoo, and McDonalds she fell asleep in the car on the way back to her house. When we got there, and I woke her to go into the house, she started crying. She wouldn’t stop; she was very upset. I knew how I would act years ago when I was a parent, but I also knew my daughter was different, so I called her. She said just pick her up gently, take her inside, put her in her parents’ bed, and let her cry. I would have been very different, but I did it and then turned on the TV. She stopped crying a few minutes after being put in bed. About 15 minutes later, she came in to where I was watching TV and snuggled up beside and we watched National Geographic together. I kept thinking, isn’t it the way it’s supposed to be when each generation gets better than the last generation in raising children? The world changes and we need to change with it. I might think about “the good old days,” but I also question how good they were.
For years my wife has been convinced that one of our children is going to get run over by a car. She’s been very strict about letting them play outside – except for in our back yard. I think it has something to do with how we don’t experience death like we used to. Not too many generations ago, many couples were having more kids than what they wanted. But paired with that was higher chances of fatal accidents. As a result, it was very likely that everyone would have been to multiple funerals for children and teenagers. Most people survived to adulthood, but not all. But today, is different. Losing a child has gone from being a sad thing that’s part of life, to something that is actually unthinkable and is the ultimate sign of failing as a human being.