Kids in small towns

This is not entirely on topic since I live in Ukraine right now at a camp facility and not in the US. We can allow our 2 year old son to wander a bit but that is mostly due to the walls around the camp and 40 or so employees that help keep an eye on him. Outside our camp, I wouldn't let a 14 year old do very much unsupervised.

Here it is common to see children of school age (5-15) walking all over without parental supervision. I imagine that this is more due to negligent parenting (stemming from high unemployment and widespread alcoholism) than to a belief in an inherently trusting or safe society - because it is NOT safe here. Kidnappings are common and Ukraine is listed along side counties like Mauritania (which just criminalized slavery in 2007) for it's record on human trafficking. There is a 20 year old girl that comes to our vocational school who was snatched off the streets here when she was 16 and taken to Siberia and forced into prostitution for 2 years. When she finally escaped and made her way back home, her mother just indignantly asked where she'd been for so long. It's hard to say whether the trafficking is so rampant because of bad parenting but it surely can't help.

I live just on the very outskirts of Columbus, OH, mixed income, mixed race neighborhood. My oldest is 9, and we let him venture out for hours on end, and never think twice about it. The neighborhood is not crime free by any measure, although we don't have any violence.

"pretty soon we've replicated the thing we tried to escape. Haven't we?" Let it go Rod. As soon as the kids are through high school, we have our eye on a little town just north of here. If I never hear a police siren/helicopter as long as I live it will be a blessing.

We usually live down a country road in coastal Maine--yup--one of those non-violent states. Not counting November (hunting!) my kids have free range all through our 11 acres and the neighboring woods/yards. In the summer they can be gone for hours--comming home with yogurt containers full of berries. Idyllic, I know. Lots of fort action, and raft making going on too.

This past school year we have been in Portland OR--in a safe part of the city--it's been an adjustment--but I find the kids are eager to play in the little yard, and make bridges in the stream behind our building. But I'm glad we'll be returning to Maine in a couple of months!

Allison's connection to coastal Maine echoes mine - I moved to my adopted state for the third time just last week, to Lincoln County (pop. c. 35,000), about halfway between Portland, where I lived a dozen years ago, and Belfast, where I lived two decades ago.*

mapquest.com/mq/2-Vvz0iMnl

*I even explored Allison's other northern latitude, the Portland, Oregon, area last fall towa prospective relocation.

Across a dozen family moves punctuating every year or two growing up as a GM brat in the 1960s and 1970s, I had no hometown of my own, save for those of my parents in the towns near Marquette in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, at whose pine-forested Superior lakeshore we took six weeks' cabined refuge yearly.

So when the urge to bolt, first, the corporate-suburban jungles of Westport, CT, then, later, the Moloch on the Potomac, for a Pine Tree State of mind hit me, it was with a convert's zeal, refreshed each time.

I can say one thing, which grabbed me my first trip up here after my junior year at NYU a quarter-century ago, and which still holds: there's an almost mystic, knotty-pine, land-that-Progress-forgot feel about much of this state, tourist-trap congestion aside, that even this excitable-boy rhapsodist-to-excess can't quite capture in words. Some among my fellow bohemian-reactionary paleo-whatevers tend toward the trap of converting their private aesthetic unto pseudo-objective dogma and thence unto moral-cum-actual legislation directed at the scorned unwashed. But the former economist in me knows how dependent is his relative material comfort, even at his minimalist book/music-seller's level, upon the behemoth, high-density spaghetti-interchanged urban-suburban megalopoli he has chosen to avoid after his quietist tastes. Better a one-man evolution than a million-man revolution of the familiar bayonet type, for one who, more aware than most, perhaps, of the required tradeoffs, relishes the exercise, and the enhancement, of that Yankee ingenuity which is the adopted twin of a Yooper stoicism which is, still, only an ice-scraper away.

Well, have no fear, scaredy-cats, Nanny State has yer'back. Those infamous urban horrors won't happen in your local inner city sports franchise if BigBrother can help it:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080429/OPINION04/804290324/1068/OPINION

Make sure you bring your FedGov recommended Homeland Security blanket (an emergency supply of prepaid cell phones) for junior too, then he can call you from the foster care placement to tell you how the lemonade tasted!

Heck I duck more *hi* every Wednesday as I drive the Philly badlands to the Church I volunteer in than yuuze guys will likely see in a lifetime, but I'm nor worried. My odds are a darn site better than the kids who have to walk the same streets to get to class... day in and day out. The eponymous steel-clad diner where Hilary had that rousing MainStreet rally with ex-Philly mayor Ed Rendell? That's the place of carnage that orphaned three of the siblings I have taught in recent years... didn't recall that being mentioned on the news on ABC, CNN etc. etc. just lots of empty talk about more money for more cops, so we can catch and incarcerate more Americans for the non-violent crime of enjoying their "free-market" version of non-licensed recreational "hard lemonade"...

http://www.mises.org/story/2957

where the State takes the ultimate sanction - your human liberty - for a mathematical potshot at three strikes with some dried up plant material of lesser or greater potency (forgive the pun, its was intended) all the while granting license to the concession stands to sell an intoxicant to drivers of 5,000-lb, lethal weapon, SUVs who over the course of a ball game may consume sufficient to cause the involuntary manslaughter of the occupants of the owners vehicle and many multiples of the occupants of others tangentially involved in a probable car wreck on the trip home from this charming "family outing"....

Rod, suck a Baldrian Lozenge from the local organic dried goods store take a deep breath, and then stick to your thesis -- the barbarians are within the gates:
WE'RE the BARBARIANS, you can RUN but can't HIDE.

We need to spring clean our mental faculties and begin challenging the malinvestments in our neightborhood infrastructures that permit this clouded reasoning of millenialism, that is so divisive and quite frankly, completely unjustified on the merits (throw a map pin anywhere else in the globe -- other than Amsterdam, my favorite place, Susan -- and you'll see how blessed we here at home in the US really are, bullets and all...

unless like the kids I teach, who are semi-orphaned or neglected 'cos a custodial parent is serving time on on our tab for drawing attention to the ludicrous moralisms of the puritanical juridical traditions that have closed the American mind ...

or you're the poor fiance stood-up at the altar by a callous corpse rendered as waterproof as a colander by fifty (FIFTY) shots fired in two minutes earlier that morning as he rolls out of his stag-night party with a couple of good-time girls he paid his good-earned money for on the free market (yup the same kind of ladies that Hollywood made a fortune depicting in frilly nickers in Westerns in the Ozzie'n'Harriet fifties y'all pine for and hanker after...)

I live in the mostly white suburbs of Philadelphia. It's not free of crime or perverts. I let my kids walk to the bus stop without supervision, but I prefer that they go together and not alone. I'm the only parent in the neighborhood who doesn't walk to the stop and stay until the bus arrives. I let my girls go off and play together out of my view at my son's baseball games. They've been given instructions over and over again on how to manage themselves, and I hope that they wouldn't fall for the usual tricks of a pervert. Statistically, it's the people you know and trust who are most likely to harm your kid- relatives, friendly neighbors, babysitters, teachers, clergy, etc.

(yup the same kind of ladies that Hollywood made a fortune depicting in frilly nickers in Westerns in the Ozzie'n'Harriet fifties y'all pine for and hanker after...)

Nelson's Law of Nostalgia Falsification: The expression of longing for more stable, morally conservative and socially capitalized living environments associated with the recent past inevitably provokes reference to 1950s television series "Ozzie & Harriet" in attempt to delegitimize that desire.

Your phrase "longing for more stable, morally conservative and socially capitalized living environments"
could be parsed by Mr Frizl's defence attorny in Austria to justify his abomination as the truth on human dignity:
"'sentimental fanticizing for more 'controlled' and 'domestic' living environment in a 'family compound'" and you would be entitled build a bunker for your daughter's and your incestous grandchildren too...? (Or perhaps less egregiously, start your own Mormon splinter sect a la Jeffs and his FLDS?)

Evil enters in, not merely the interstices in the atmosphere of the space you occupy physically, but the interstices in the atmosphere of the space God ought occupy in Man's heart... thus I stand by my assertion that the Ozzie and Harriet syndrome is an avoidance mechanism for facing the truth. When do you think the paederast priests where learning their dastardly trade, while the flock sat watching TV waited for them to ply games with our altar boys? They were altar boys too, back in the day, probably sitting right next to some of us or our family members right there on the sofa ...

Where did the syphylis come from that killed Europe's best and brightest musicians, authors, monarchs and courtesans? Our American native populations were immune to the home-grown bacilli... We live in a fallen world, NOW in this present moment... let us not attempt to be whited sepulcres before our time, and pray for mercy on that good day for a well formed conscience of the real evil we attempt to combat all the days of our lives ...

could be parsed by Mr Frizl's defence attorny in Austria to justify his abomination as the truth on human dignity:

Because, you know, people who want a safer neighborhood for their children to grow up in really just want to put their kids in a basement dungeon and have sex with them for 20 years.

You know, I was wondering when somebody was going to claim in these comboxes that the monstrous Austrian pervert embodied social conservatism. I knew it was bound to happen. I just didn't think it would be Clare Krishan who made that kind of batpoop insane remark.

Grew up in NY. Took the buses from age 8, and the subways not much later. Rode my bike to Greenwich Village and back at 12, with no helmet (only soldiers and sandhogs wore those).

When you see pictures of Baghdad, which is supposed to be more dangerous than NY or Dallas, you see little boys running in packs (rarely girls).

Go figure.

Sorry to dissappoint Rod!
Appreciate you taking it on the chin... (I'm on oral steroids for my allergies and a dose or two away from insanity as you correctly discerned!!)

We live in a pretty big city in an older neighborhood and my kids have a pretty high degree of freedom. At 11, my daughter rides her bike and skates around the block and goes to the neighborhood park with her friends. My 14 year old son walks home alone somedays (especially when he is doing something with his band buddies) and has the run of the neighborhood. He heads off to his neighbor buddies homes, to our little neighborhood's downtown or to the park to practice lacrosse. He has to tell us where he's going and check in if he's made any big changes but he's otherwise free. The cell phone has given him lots more freedom.

I grew up in NYC and was riding public transportation from the age of 8 by myself. That was a bit early. Most of my affluent, white friends I went to private school with started around age 10. I started going to the store up the hill by myself when I was 6, in the first grade. And NYC was WAY more dangerous then than it is now.

I have friends who are raising kids in the city and their kids have way more independence than the suburban kids I know, who depend on their parents to drive them everywhere. We know one couple who started letting their kids walk around their Brooklyn neighborhood at ages 8 and 5, as long as they stayed together.

We have gang tags in my middle class, mixed race (white, Asian, black) neighborhood too. But I still let my kid out by himself. He's 12. To do otherwise would be over-protective, IMO, even though I do worry sometimes. I follow the police blotters and neighborhood gossip pretty closely and have found that kids who mind their own business, keep it moving and don't hang out with the wrong crowd tend to be okay. And they develop much-needed street smarts. Just as we all did back in the '70s.

I think that Nina's 8:58 post is the most important one on this thread.

And there's a corollary to it, too, which is that the disappearance of SAHMs has made things really, really hard for the SAHMs who are still out there.

When I was a kid, my mom got extremely tired of having every working mom in the neighborhood feel free to dump her kids in our yard for hours every afternoon and evening, knowing she was home and we were outside playing anyway. What difference did a few extra kids make? My mom used to get particularly annoyed when it would be past dinnertime or time for us to do our homework and she'd have to tell two or three kids that they had go home now--and then have to figure out who they were and where they belonged.

As a teen, I babysat for several families in the neighborhood we were living in, as did my sisters. It got to the point, though, where we couldn't go outside to ride our bicycles or take a walk--six doors would immediately open, and six two-year-olds would be sent out unaccompanied in the belief that as we were outside anyway we wouldn't mind having to watch the little ones.

The reasons the social compact Nina describes worked are many. One was that it was never one person's job all the time to watch all the kids in the neighborhood--this was a shared responsibility, and if the kids were building a campsite in your yard one day they'd probably be swinging on a tire swing in somebody else's yard the next. Another was that we didn't live then in the litigious society we do now, where there's a real possibility that if a child falls down and breaks his wrist in your driveway you'll be sued for failing to provide a safe environment--even if he wasn't invited to be there in the first place!

The biggest difference, though, was that underneath everything the parents were operating on a basis of shared values, responsibility, and respect for each other. Rules were set and were respected, for the most part, and nobody put up with the more common childhood types of illicit behavior.

Granted, things weren't perfect then; I don't believe that social problems bloomed out of nowhere sometime in the late sixties. But when it came to the kids, the adults tended to present a united front, something that simply isn't true any more.

I had three of my four children in the 70s, which was kind of a trough in the fertility rate, so there wasn't a lot of mom-solidarity for me. We tended to be the house on the block where the neighborhood children would congregate--not always, but most of the time. In the 80s when my youngest was little, we lived in another neighborhood where our house seemed to be the kid magnet. Yes, there was a working mother who let her son come over and felt free to call on me for help pretty often, always promising to return the favor but seldom doing so. I can't say I resented it, though. To tell the truth, I loved having my children's friends in the house, even when it was sometimes inconvenient. Who doesn't want to be the one whose house is the most fun, and the one who has the best cookies, the one who will let you play with the hose, build houses with chairs and blankets, and make stuff with paper and crayons? It beats feeling as if your children would rather be elsewhere!

I've said it before, but I think it bears repetition. If you want community, somebody has to put in a little extra, and it's a sure bet that you're always going to think it's YOU who's doing the most. The other neighbors might disagree. : ) The important thing is that you're all willing to keep going, even if you secretly think you're doing more than your share.

Katherine, I have found it helpful to organize a summer block party each year, and to host it in our front yard.
You will also meet neighbors if your children attend a school in the neighborhood.

Well, Sig, we moved a lot growing up, and I'm the second of nine. While my mom was pretty good about letting us have friends over, I think she could be forgiven getting a little bent out of shape when kids we'd never seen before would show up from three streets over, and reply, when Mom would say it was time for them to go home, "I can't. I'm supposed to stay out of my mom's way until 9 o'clock."

Or to walk a two-year-old home from the densely wooded and hilly area behind our house, only to have her mother shrug and say, "Oh, she likes to wander. And you've got plenty of people over there to keep an eye on her, so I don't worry."

That's not community--that's abuse.

Erin, my reflections were about my own experience, and were intended as a general reflection on how to create a sense of neighborhood community--not as a criticism of your family. I'm sorry if it came across as being about you personally.

I certainly think that every mother has a right to set some boundaries for her own family. Community can't exist without good boundaries, either. I think letting a two-year-old wander the streets in the expectation that someone else will save her from harm certainly was abuse! Not of you, but of the child. Perhaps if the neglectful mother had been told by neighbors that the next time they found her two-year-old on the loose, they were going to call Child Protective Services, she might have changed her ways. Sometimes a community needs to do things that like, too. I had no hesitation in calling other parents when I thought their child was doing something destructive, and I got some flak for that. But I thought, hey, if you're going to let this happen where I have to see it, then I'm going to deal with it to the best of my ability.

Some suggestions:
1) Take walks around your neighborhood. Get a dog if you really feel you must.
2) Actually offer to do chores (snow-shoveling, etc.) for elderly people on your street. Get to know them any way you can. They see and know everything that's going on.
3) If your neighborhood doesn't have a community newsletter, start one.
4) Start a babysitting co-op, where parents exchange sits on a no-pay basis.
5) Remember, kids, if you want "community" you have to "be community."

when the model shifts towards a model in which more or even most people demand the benefits of community without being willing to do even the minimum of participation, then you no longer have a community.

Yes, this is sadly true. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to get something started with people who repeatedly crush and toss the possibility of community like an empty pop can. I always try to keep the door open just a crack, though, because you never know when they might change their minds. ; )

I really enjoyed the article about the woman who let her nine year old find his way home in NYC, so I bundled off my 13-year-old to go into and come back out of New York (to NJ) by transportation last week. He had a great time and felt very independent. But then, we live in one of those little towns where kids play manhunt until 11:00 in someone's yard and everyone can bike all over town--and if they act up another mother will yell at them.

Actually, the funniest anecdote I have on that one is when we moved from San Diego, California (Navy town, city AND California? Surely the nineth Circle of hell, regarding child rearing) to a tiny town in Ohio by the name of Millville.

Cute little thing.. a population in the low triple digits. We thought it was great.. until the police sweep came through and arrested about half the town for some connection to Crack dealing.

Seems it was a stop on the pipeline from Florida to Chicago.

Ooops.

I build fences and such in the country outside of Dallas and Ft Worth.

What is it with Texans and fences? When I lived in Texas(Plano) there was an ordinance that you had to have a fence.

I agree with fbc that "the problem ain't the cities." If I recall my Jane Jacobs correctly from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she pointed out that many of the most desperate ethnic ghettoes of 1930s Boston were remarkably crime-free. In fact, Jacobs' description of these neighborhoods reads an awful lot like Rod's depiction of his hometown. To rework Slick Willie's slogan, "it's the culture, stupid."

I know quite a few traditional-minded families who moved out to the middle of nowhere in search of a good place to raise their kids. Did the kids escape the grasp of the world? Not necessarily. These families were self-made islands. Once the children floated out to the sea of normal society, some weren't ready for the encounter and ended up succumbing to the influence of bad companions.

What's the lesson in this? I think it's imperative that parents raise their children to be engaged with the world, not to be afraid of it. It doesn't matter whether you live in a farmhouse in western Nebraska, suburban Dallas, or in a Baltimore rowhouse, the principle is the same. If parents take care to inculcate decency and respect for tradition in their children, they'll probably turn out OK.

I remember Rod talking about Robert Putnam's findings that diversity lessens social capital in neighborhoods. I would argue that it's not a racial thing, but a cultural thing. We need a sustained effort to create neighborhoods where culture, not income or race, is the primary bond. Please don't take this as an argument for prejudice against outsiders. I'm just saying it's imperative that people reach out and try to create these bonds rather than hunker down in their homes after work. I wish I myself could live up to that ideal...

Erin Manning: And there's a corollary to it, too, which is that the disappearance of SAHMs has made things really, really hard for the SAHMs who are still out there.

This is a significant point, often overlooked. Neighborhoods need a "critical mass" of SAHMs (and other interested adults) in order to provide a congenial environment.

Many people in many neighborhoods are not home, not just during the day, but into the evening as well. People in America are expected to work ridiculous hours, and have virtually no home/neighborhood / family time.

As a corollary, many kids with parents working until 7, 8, 9 PM *are* at home - they're just virtually locked up inside their homes with the TV and video games, not permitted either to go out or to have friends over. I have seen young adults that I *knew* were raised like that (because I knew their families), and as young adults they have serious problems.

Many neighborhoods are extremely economically segregated (the housing bubble bust might break that down a bit.) Wealthier families (in my experience, anyway) do not want their children "running around the streets," not just for safety, but because unconstructed play is seen as a "waste of time." Kids should be at tutors, music lessons, playing on sports teams, all to "get into a good college," because everyone knows being in the band and on a sports team make you a "desirable" applicant. This "ambitionism" has become the sine qua non of many families' lives. The children of poorer people, meanwhile, still play in the streets and around the neighborhoods.

Finally, my experience at least, is that even though we might laugh at Hillary Clinton's "It takes a village" remark, in a sense it *is* true. SAHMs really do need each other, and not just 20 miles away by car, in the other suburb, but on the same block, in the house next door. We're not chimpanzees; child-rearing is *not* a solitary venture in the human animal. Commercial substitutes like pre-schools, kiddie gyms, programs offered by institutions (schools, etc.) are NOT a substitute for a wide network of SAHMs in close proximity to each other.