To be surprised by this level of overprotectiveness!

[IrishTwin]

My colleague at work just told me she doesn't allow her 9 1/2 year old son out alone in their back garden!! I actually didn't know what to say! Her son hasn't got any additional needs or problems,is Nt ( Neuro-typical) and goes to a mainstream school Im actually pretty shocked at this! Am I wrong to this this is is beyond overprotection!

Unlimited freedom is not best either though PookieDo the idea is that as parents we should be teaching our children independence through increasing freedom as they grow up, where they learn to handle 'dangers 'in situations that aren't so dangerous so that they have a better handle on things when they are older and exposed to more dangerous situations. Its not a magic bullet of course, but preparing your child for the world protects them more in the long run than keeping them supervised for as long as possible.

Thank you myth.

I agree with PPs that children & teenagers need relatively close parenting WRT relationships, friendships etc. But that's a different issue. Playing in the garden or letting a 7yo walk 10 minutes home along quiet streets is very risk free compared to, say, letting a 13 year go out for the evening and having no idea where they are or who they're with. It doesn't have to be either or.

Cross posted, Natsku. I agree.

Yes I agree, it's got to be a really gradual thing. DD (9) has just started getting a bus on her own. I know she'd be capable of going all the way to her activities on her own and back in terms of knowing the way, when to change buses etc as would her little brother (we don't drive so they've been on buses pretty much every day of their lives and they're now home educated so we go to different places all the time) but I do worry about her distractibility (she's under assessment for ASD/ADHD) so we're doing it really gradually - DH saw her onto the bus at one end (after her class, he had to go to work so didn't have time to bring her home) and then phoned me so I knew when to wait at the other end. My mum was horrified! But it was an easy first step.

The above example is probably a bit more gradual than most! But it's mainly because of the distraction issue. Otherwise I would let her do more sooner

Natsku. My son is born and bred in Finland, up until the age of 9. Then we moved to my home country of Australia.

Holy moly the difference! My son was putside alone with his mates by the age of five. All day and even into the evening, as you know it is dark so much of the year 😂.

We originally lived near Pohjois-Haaga, in Helsinki. Then we moved to Haikala, in Klaukkala, Nurmijärvi.

My son would be outside from early morning till 9pm at night. With all his mates! Us parents would see our kids just for food. They'd spend all day playing in the forest areas and in winter even outside for hours in -25 etc.

When we moved home to Australia...... it has completely changed from my youth. I had a youth like my son did in Finland. You see almost no children in the street here anymore. I live in a middle class suburb of Brisbane. Hardly any crime at all. But there are no children outside playing cricket. The primary school has just a few parents walking their kids there, but most parents drive their kids. My son is in high school now. He is 12. He has always walked to and fro in regards to school. He even crosses the one main road into the city. However does he survive? 😂

Instead of being outside playing all hours. The kids sit playing all their bloody electronic shit. There are now sooooo many draconian laws regarding children here now. They act like every kid is going to be kidnapped and murdered, when the reality of the situation is, our children are so much safer now than we were growing up and we lived outside, nowhere near adult supervision most days!

It is just so sad what has happened here in Australia. All the paranoid too overprotective parents, but mostly the bloody rules they keep on forcing onto us parents and kids.

My son has been going to the store etc alone since we moved home. I got told off once for such a thing. Ugh.

This is the only part I really feel bad about for my son. He deserves the childhood he had in Finland. Not the non-childhood that is happening in suburbia Australia.

Annoyingly our local shop is a bit far. It's not like when I was a kid and could pop 5 minutes down the road to the garage for milk etc and buy far too much chocolate - it's 20 minutes walk with some very busy roads, not all of which have crossings. DD is itching to go but I think it's a bit of a leap at the moment so I'll start walking partway with her etc. But we may be moving soon and if we end up with a house nearer the shops then it'll be a priority to start getting her doing that as I think she's the right age.

In the meantime they can go off to specific shops in town to either browse or to buy something specific while I wait for them. It actually started because I have an illness that sometimes means even a little extra walking will cause me pain, so I started to say that I'd wait at the bus stop while I watched them go to get a drink etc.

I'd say DD's got slightly more independence than average among her same-age friends. A lot of people were shocked when I said the bus thing.

Some of these posts really make me want to move to Scandinavia! :(

We're in a small town in Pirkanmaa mise there's not so many children DD's age in our immediate area so she's not able to roam as far as she could with friends but I expect once she starts school she'll get more friends and that's usually the age in my town when the children can start riding their bikes across town to see their mates. We have a big forested "mountain" on our doorstep which I imagine will be DD's playground soon enough, and the lake on the other side of the main road.

I love that I always see gangs of children out and about, especially in the summer, and they're (for the most part) actually playing rather than causing trouble. There's a lot more gratuitous swearing than I remember from my childhood but otherwise they are much more polite than I remember school children being back in the UK, certainly more so than me and my friends were!

No ridiculous laws thank goodness, there was quite a fuss when it was considered that they might stop teachers from just sending off second graders (8yrs) on their cross-country ski routes by themselves after two girls got bored and decided to ski home instead Not a chance of that even being allowed in the first place back in the UK! All the professionals (related to children, like teachers and social workers) I've ever mentioned DD's escapades to don't bet their eyelids at all, just saying "ah now's a good age to let them have more freedom"

Sorry your son didn't get to finish his childhood in Finland but I'm sure he makes the most of his Australian childhood - glad he's not giving up his independence that he can have like walking to the shops!

I think my son would have been better off finishing his childhood in Finland. But I am probably becoming unsure of that, what with all thr drama/problems in Europe now. Finland is still insulated from most of it, but it will come.

I think my son has a whole lot more opportunities here, than there. That's a big positive. Higher education is so difficult to get into there. Even for something like learning to be a makeup artist. That's the biggest downfall of Finland.

There are heaps of positives and negatives with both countries. My son is happy to be here in Australia. If he was miserable I'd send him back to his Finnish Dad.

But anyway. Let your daughter be as free as she wants. Finland is one of the safest countries in the world for children, still. Not so much Sweden anymore, with recent rapes of children. So relish all your daughter's freedom and encourage it 😊.

And the big reliance on qualifications - there's schooling for every bloody job here!

I shall certainly relish DD's freedom, so happy she can grow up here.

you should

I am talking about 'parenting fails' like giving your kids chicken nuggets... to me that is far, far worse than being a bit overprotective.

Dallas Giving kids chicken nuggets is not a parenting fail. Watching your 12 yo son every time he goes into the garden is.... You do realise he's going to wanking pretty soon.... are you planning to watch that too?

Mise

Australia does come across as strict and very focussed on rules and restrictions based on other MNers.... which is odd as when I was young but always had the reputation of being a relaxed and easygoing place.

Coconutella yes it bloody well is these days!!! It use to be so laid back. I left as a young adult and returned 14 years later to a country I hardly notice!

Every little activity children do at school/off school grounds requires each student to sign a paper how to behave and so on. Every.single.time. If they don't follow all the strict rules such and such happen. Sign here to agree. When I went to school you did not need to be told at every activity. You did not need to sign behaviour papers. What the teacher said goes. Simple as that. You knew how to behave.

There is very little protection for employees anymore and so people are always stressed about losing jobs. We are a fire at will country. You have to work and work and work. The working balance to life balance is much better in Europe.

And worse. When I returned it was like my carefree non-materialistic country had turned into a mini America. Huge suvs, hige houses, so much materialism now.

I knew Australians in Europe who returned home, only to return to Europe. Said they no longer recognise the country, or the people and think it has gotten quite awful.

It is sad. But what can you do?

We are still better off than most countries in the world 😊

Perhaps anxiety or he has needs you don't know about. I am like that but lost 2 daughters and sons have had special needs. You wouldn't know looking at them but they had no sense of danger etc.

All of the surveys people are quoting on here seem to point to the same thing: a correlation between children being given independence and children being happy. I will bring my children up to be independent even though it sometimes terrifies me. It's a parent's job to gradually prepare children for adulthood. Being alone upstairs or in the garden are probably the first opportunities a small child has to feel separate to a parent and it's crucial for their development to gradually build up these experiences of being alone so that our children are ready for secondary school/college/employment and living independently. We are doing them a massive disservice if we overprotect imo

MissDallas Sun 14-May-17 11:33:06
"Well, I have never heard of anyone's parents escorting them to uni or work, so I guess they must sort themselves out eventually. Just a bit later."

I work at a largish university and I do see and hear of plenty of undergraduates who struggle and get into difficult or dangerous situations because they have no practice in assessing risks or making independent decisions.

The problem with "a bit later" is that life gets a lot more dangerous later on. A 15yo at a party can get into far more serious trouble than a 9yo in his parents' garden. A 19yo alone at uni at the other end of the country even more so.

Besides, I always think it is a bit unfair when first semester students are so busy trying to learn basic skills like how to use a bus or use a map that it keeps them from concentrating on their studies.

Otoh I have never heard of a student who got into trouble during Freshers Week because their parents had fed them chicken nuggets.

MissDallas, nobody is advocating unlimited freedom. We are advocating a gradually increasing freedom which is based on the idea that there is a caring parent in the background who is always willing to teach about sensible decision-making, but that the child then gets more and more opportunity to practise what they have been taught.

It's like teaching swimming: not much point if they never get to enter the pool because it's too dangerous.

This thread is getting quite nasty, I think I'll leave now.

Nasty? I don't see any nastiness, just more in-depth explanation of why overprotecting your children isn't really a good thing to do.

I will bring my children up to be independent even though it sometimes terrifies me

Very well said. It does make me really anxious at times when I don't know exactly where DD is because she's out roaming but I then make myself a cup of tea and remind myself that the chances of anything bad happening to her in this safe area are extremely low while the things she is learning are extremely important, and of course how happy it makes her. I still remember the immense joy the first time my mum sent me to fetch my brother from tennis alone - I can picture in my mind every step of the walk and how big I felt.

I have memories like that too, Natsku.

Of course one has to allow for SN. Dd has a physical condition that meant she could collapse very suddenly and sometimes needed to use a wheelchair, and also an anxiety disorder which led to frequent panic attacks. Her road to independence had to be planned in slightly different ways. But I still felt she needed that sense of "I know what I am doing, I can cope on my own". Perhaps she needed it more than other children because it was always going to be harder for her.

Well, I have never heard of anyone's parents escorting them to uni or work, so I guess they must sort themselves out eventually. Just a bit later.
I dunno, one of DDs school friends was taken for her 18th birthday to the play trail in local country park, the friendship group were all and . Mum took the DD to all open university days, the DD applied for a holiday job in the summer before going to uni, mum went with her to the interview, didn't get the job and put the house on the market intending to buy in the uni town, but couldn't get a buyer.
The DD now lives 350 miles away from her parents. So yeah later...at 23..

her 8 year old is not allowed to drink from a glass

Does she still use a sippy cup??! What do they do if they go to a restaurant and they don't have plastic cups? Though I'm guessing they take all the toddler child paraphernalia wherever they go. Is she allowed breakable plates or do they take plastic ones out with them and transfer her food over? Does she go to Brownies or anything like that where there's non-related children?

My DS has been using a glass regularly since he was about 4 and ditto china plates (he has retro Peter Rabbit ones which are not too pricey on Ebay but has only broken one, he's 5).

My DD is allowed to drink from a glass if we help her, in a restaurant without plastic cups. If you go to Bella Italia they give children their drinks in incredibly cute glass bottles with little curly straws. Please tell her never to go there just in case.

oh and they are allowed to play in our garden but they have to come in if they throw gravel