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On playing unsupervised
Sep. 2nd, 2018 07:49 amInspired by this NY Times opinion piece, and I guess by a scene in the recent "Christopher Robin" movie in which adult-Christopher-Robin's wife tells her daughter to "go outside and play. I expect you to come home filthy." The girl, who's been "on holiday" studying for hours a day, is puzzled by the unusual request, but makes a dutiful attempt to do as she's told, meets her father's toys, and the rest of the movie is off-topic for this post.
When I was 9 and my brother was 6, we were latchkey children: our parents were recently separated, our mother worked long hours, and we both came home from school hours before she came home from work. Not to mention summer vacation, when we were home without her all day. We had library cards, of course, and one of the first things she did on moving to a new apartment was teach us the walking route to the library, which (Google Maps now says) was 0.9 mile each way, and the two of us often took that expedition together. (It required crossing one four-lane road and a couple of small residential streets, but there was a pedestrian overpass over the four-lane road.) On one occasion, as I told Mommy after getting home, "we were mugged" by a violent gang of 12-year-old girls, but aside from some tears and scrapes we suffered no lasting effects. We likewise routinely walked to the community swimming pool, a quarter of a mile away (where there were of course lifeguards on duty, so we could go swimming without our mother), and played for hours in the woods a quarter of a mile away. Nobody called the cops on my mother, because we were obviously old enough and independent enough to do things like that; if she (or I) regrets any of it, it's the amount of time we spent watching TV at home.
I'm somewhat reluctant to opine profoundly on child-rearing practices, since I've never actually had a child myself (my brother acquired one last week), but only "somewhat", so here goes. Children need to have gradually decreasing levels of supervision as they age. They need to fall out of trees or off of bicycles and get scraped up, to learn that that's not the end of the world and that they can deal with it (at least long enough to get home). They need to try things and fail, to learn that that too is not the end of the world and that they can deal with it. And as the author of the Times piece points out, "The absence of adults forces children to practice their social skills. For a pickup soccer game, the children themselves must obtain voluntary participation from everyone, enforce the rules and resolve disputes with no help from a referee, and then vary the rules or norms of play when special situations arise, such as the need to include a much younger sibling in the game."
If you grow up protected from anything that could conceivably hurt you, you'll be unprepared as an adult for recovering from being hurt. If you grow up never trying anything that could conceivably fail, you'll be unprepared as an adult for recovering from failure. If you grow up with an authority figure always around to resolve disputes, you'll be unprepared as an adult for resolving disputes in any other way than going to the authorities: you'll react to challenging ideas not by weighing them against your own on their merits, but by asking the authorities to ban them or bringing lawsuits against their proponents.
When I was 9 and my brother was 6, we were latchkey children: our parents were recently separated, our mother worked long hours, and we both came home from school hours before she came home from work. Not to mention summer vacation, when we were home without her all day. We had library cards, of course, and one of the first things she did on moving to a new apartment was teach us the walking route to the library, which (Google Maps now says) was 0.9 mile each way, and the two of us often took that expedition together. (It required crossing one four-lane road and a couple of small residential streets, but there was a pedestrian overpass over the four-lane road.) On one occasion, as I told Mommy after getting home, "we were mugged" by a violent gang of 12-year-old girls, but aside from some tears and scrapes we suffered no lasting effects. We likewise routinely walked to the community swimming pool, a quarter of a mile away (where there were of course lifeguards on duty, so we could go swimming without our mother), and played for hours in the woods a quarter of a mile away. Nobody called the cops on my mother, because we were obviously old enough and independent enough to do things like that; if she (or I) regrets any of it, it's the amount of time we spent watching TV at home.
I'm somewhat reluctant to opine profoundly on child-rearing practices, since I've never actually had a child myself (my brother acquired one last week), but only "somewhat", so here goes. Children need to have gradually decreasing levels of supervision as they age. They need to fall out of trees or off of bicycles and get scraped up, to learn that that's not the end of the world and that they can deal with it (at least long enough to get home). They need to try things and fail, to learn that that too is not the end of the world and that they can deal with it. And as the author of the Times piece points out, "The absence of adults forces children to practice their social skills. For a pickup soccer game, the children themselves must obtain voluntary participation from everyone, enforce the rules and resolve disputes with no help from a referee, and then vary the rules or norms of play when special situations arise, such as the need to include a much younger sibling in the game."
If you grow up protected from anything that could conceivably hurt you, you'll be unprepared as an adult for recovering from being hurt. If you grow up never trying anything that could conceivably fail, you'll be unprepared as an adult for recovering from failure. If you grow up with an authority figure always around to resolve disputes, you'll be unprepared as an adult for resolving disputes in any other way than going to the authorities: you'll react to challenging ideas not by weighing them against your own on their merits, but by asking the authorities to ban them or bringing lawsuits against their proponents.
