My parents would have spent their lives in prison. I roamed the countryside so much as a kid, it’s likely my parents couldn’t have found me with a bloodhound. Police in Maryland picked up a ten year old and a six year old for walking home from the park. A mile from their home. The parents may be charged. As I say, my own parents would have been repeat offenders in letting me wander.
“Free range” kids, they are calling them these days. Like the kids are just out there clucking and pecking grain aimlessly. Can it be that walking from the park is so high risk as to rate a ride in a squad car?
I walked a mile uphill – both directions – just to get to school (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), in the snow and rain, so I could get learned up. Did it unattended much of the time. Unsupervised. And during the summer months?
The hills were alive with bugs and snakes and rocks and the curiosity of a ten year old kid.
Now, it seems amazing that any of my generation survived. All that wandering around like marooned survivors. Enjoying it, too. Back in my day (which I had promised to never say, but – rebel that I am – rules are made to be broken. Excepting, of course, that walking home from the park rule). Yes, back in my day we described all the walking and wandering around by a quaint term.
Playing.
Sure, that was then. A different era. We were out playing. I get it that things are not the same as when I was a kid, even if I don’t really understand why it has to be that way. But – it is also true that kids were lost and hurt and heaven forbid! got into trouble even back in my yuteful youth. It just didn’t make the national news. Unfortunately, kidnapping wasn’t invented this past decade. There was a risk then just like there is now, and I’m guessing it is still an inherently small percentage of children taken by strangers in any given year.
I’m not saying bad things can’t happen.
When my kids were younger the debate was over the mall. How old? That was the most-posed question for a good year’s time, sometimes posed differently. As in, “Why can’t I go to the mall? All my friends can go.” That second line was usually delivered petulantly, guilt-inducingly. ALL the friends can go.
Well, I wasn’t going to have child services called on me. So they stayed supervised until they reached adulthood, at which point I now accompany them only about half the time. (I’m kidding, of course. It’s much less than half.) My reluctance was valid. No sooner did they get to the mall with all their friends, than they returned home as victims of violence. Ear piercings, for example.
That was in the general time-frame when I would have PAID them to walk a mile, so I wouldn’t have to stop my project to drive them across the neighborhood to the friend’s house, so they could be driven to the mall, so they could walk around and hang out. (Probably putting more than a mile of mall-walking on those name-brand tennis shoes that wouldn’t traverse our neighborhood.)
The Maryland kids spent hours with child protective services officers before finally being released, and now the parents are being investigated. Child neglect or endangerment or something.
I’m hoping there is more to the story than just walking home from the park. Maybe it’s gang-infested territory. Maybe wild dogs roam in packs through there. Could be an asteroid impact zone, for all I know.
But if the kids are walking home on the sidewalk after playing outdoors – without battery-backed-video-stimulation – I’m thinking the parents deserve a medal.
It’s not a long walk this direction, so… Come visit!
McHuston
Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!