'Go and Play'

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An article showed up in the LA Times that I though would stimulate some discussion here.

This is the article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 233.column

In March, Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother, gave her 9-year-old son, Izzy, a MetroCard, a subway map, a $20 bill and some quarters for pay phones. Then she let him make his own way home from Bloomingdale's department store -- by subway and bus.

Izzy survived unscathed. He wasn't abducted by a perverted stranger or pushed under an oncoming train by a homicidal maniac. He didn't even get lost. According to Skenazy, who wrote about it in a New York Sun column, he arrived home "ecstatic with independence."

His mother wasn't so lucky. Her column generated as much outrage as if she'd suggested that mothers make extra cash by hiring their kids out as child prostitutes.

But it also reinvigorated an important debate about children, safety and independence.

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So what does everyone think of this, as applied to our kids? Obviously, this is going to depend largely on the maturity and level of function of your child. But there is no reward (independence, which is what we all want for our children) without risk. So how do you decide when you've reached an 'acceptable level of risk' in your child's development?

M

Ha.

I personally think, if this woman knows her own child, and is confident in his abilities, then she probably was OK in doing this. How should I know how independent and capable her kid is? I also don't know how dangerous the route is home from Bloomingdales. It may not be that scary, so maybe this isn't such a big deal. But, for ME and MY KID, I know I could NEVER do this.

Just yesterday, my 12 year old son, who has been riding his bike in the neighborhood a lot through the summer, announced to me that THAT day, he was going to ride to 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven is under two miles away, and to get there, you have to cross a MAJOR road. I told my son "Guess again!" But it kind of makes me sad. At 12, I would ride my bike to 7-Eleven with my sisters, and we would buy candy and drinks and come home. Safe and sound. Not a problem. Can't really do that now. I might consider it when he's a couple of years older, and he's with a friend. It sucks to be a kid in this day and age. Your freedom is really curtailed, and therefore, so is your independence. We want to get our kids out of the house and off of video games, but we aren't free to allow them to ride their bikes around the community without fear of accident or abduction.

Riding a bicycle in traffic is very dangerous. I've been in one accident and seen many.

Also it is always better to walk with at least one other person because there are
dangers... but the news terrorists lie and have them all in the wrong order.

Major causes of death, close to the right order I think:
1.Disease (well over 50%)
2.Smoking
3.Accidents (home, traffic, falls, at work, other)
4.Suicide
5.Alcohol (including overdose, bad liver, drunk driving)
6.Carbon monoxide and other accidental poisonings
7.Violence (murder and war)
8.Drowning
9.Fires

Some of the rarest are:
A.hit by lightning or electrocution (rarer than winning lottery tickets)
B.sharks or snakes or wild animals
C.plane crash

Do payphones still exist? I haven't seen one for over 10 years

9 years old????? i can't imagine that either of my sons would ever have been capable of this at that age.....i look at my 9 year old daughter & her friends and honestly can't imagine them doing this alone. definitely NOT a good idea. especially NOT in NYC!

i gave my mother a fright when i was 4 by walking home from church one day. In provo utah.

new york city? my opinion- not kewl.

Let's keep this on topic: How do you CHOOSE to balance freedom and self sufficiency for your child, knowing that some day they are going to have to deal with this and other much bigger stuff on their own? How does your child having an ASD change the choices you'd make?

My own story is somewhat similar: I lived in a semi-urban area and at age 8 my parents enrolled me in a private school in the burbs. High speed rail from our town to the train station near the school, and a 3/4 mile walk. My mother said she never worried, as I didn't care to chat up strangers, wasn't interested in dangerous and irresponsible stunts and was fascinated by the train system itself, so inevitably I would always go to the front car and stand right next to the operator and watch so that I could learn how it all worked. By the time I left that school 3 years later, I could have run one of those damn trains myself at 12 years old.

But the point remained that I was good for that, but I was worthless for other things. What has your experience been? What would you do with your child?

This one reminds me when I was young. There was me, my sister and my mother. We were in a clothes store, and I need to go to the toilet, so I said to mum, I need the toilet. I know where it is and I'll be back soon.
I go to the toilet and come back, and where the hell was she? No where to be found. So I'm looking and looking - no where. So I just gave up and walked around town and headed back home later that day. I knew where it was, I had traffic sense, I knew how to cross roads (run quickly and hope for the best - )

I couldn't understand the problem when my mother complained about where I was. So I told her, I returned to the store where she was. She called the police, an officer came round and I refused to speak as I certain my mother never listened to me. All those programs where the mother is happy to see her child safe? More like abuse... Not even, "I was worried about you!" I was around 9 or 10 at the time, no mobile phones or anything.

You pretty much have to play it by hunch - based on the place you live and and your child's intellectual capabilities.

If the kid is bicycling and the roads are dangerous, that'd put up warning alarms in my mind. But if it's a relatively safe road and the kid knows good bicycle safety (etc.) and is trustworthy, sure I'd let him go 2 miles to the store at age 9. Because you can't insulate the kid forever, and because the kid NEEDS to be able to master these things.

Would I have let my kid at 9 ride the trolley several stops to a shopping center by herself? Depends. If the trolley was not completely empty, if it was the middle of the day, if she sat in the car up behind the driver, sure, I'd have let her go. I'd have been sweating bullets while she was gone, but I'd have allowed it as long as she called me when she got to the store.

When I was a kid I lived at the edge of suburbia and farm/woodland. I was shoved out the door after breakfast, called home for lunch, shoved out the door again, called home for supper, etc. from the time I started school. I was given instructions on where I could and could not go and that was it. There were a lot of stay-at-home moms in that neighborhood, so I was never really unsupervised - word of where I'd been and what I'd done tended to be back to my mom before I was, if I'd misbehaved or done anything dangerous. Most of the time I ran through the woods and looked for salamander and stuff, and would avoid strangers like they were Jack-the-Ripper anyway.

One is no more safe from perverts, etc., in a small town than a large city. The greatest proportion of child molestations are by people the kid already knows, so "stranger danger" is kind of overkill. Yes, abductions do happen, but they are rare. If you've given the kid the basics in how to survive in the city - how to take a bus, go to a museum, when to get nervous about someone they see near them and what to do about that, I don't think 9 years old is too young to let them take a short trip by themselves. I'd want them to check in (cell phone) periodically and not deviate from the planned excursion route, but they do have to start learning how to function as adults - and you do that by doing. New York, despite its reputation, is actually a remarkably safe city. My preference in all the above situations is that they have someone else with them, some other responsible child. It's harder to "pick off" a kid who is not alone, is the theory (I know it happens, but it's rare.)

If the kid has no "common sense", of course, then you do have to factor that in. And your hair will go gray in the process. It will.

I think Nan summed it up well, you play it by hunch. You have to know your own child AND know your community, the potential dangers and risks that your child will not have become aware of.

If my child was asking for that level of independence, and I believed the route was safe, I would give it. And give my child a cell phone, a life line.

This would never have happened with my AS son because at age 9 he lacked any level of independence. He needed to be moved from one comfortable and familiar situation to another by a comfortable and familiar adult, and made that very clear by how he acted. Now that he is 11, things are changing, and he is asking for and is ready for more independence.

The general observation I've heard about AS kids is that they mature slower than average. I would agree with this. As a result, milestones related to independence are going to happen slower than for other kids. Which is kind of nice for us: we get to piggyback on other's parent's experiences.