To think that children are babied too much these days

[BlueMirror]

I think it's really sad that many children aren't allowed the independence I had when I was younger. We live on a very quiet road and while some primary age children are allowed to play outside and climb the trees in the field opposite many aren't.
I also know of 18/19 yr olds who live at home and are basically treated like young teens with their parents calling them by the minutes to check on them, restricting where they can go/who they can see. They are adults!
Aibu to think that if you aren't even allowed out of the door by yourself until you're 11 then you're not going to be fully independent by age 18 and that adolescence now seems to extend into the 20's for many young people?
Supervised 'play dates' for 10+ year olds now seem to be a thing going by threads on here! What happened to going and knocking on your friends doors and seeing who could come out?
For comparison it was normal when I was younger to walk yourself to school age 7 and children played outside from much younger. By the time you hit your teens you were expected to be responsible and behave as an adult with all the freedoms that go with that. Aibu to think that kids are generally overprotected these days?

Yanbu

There has always been controlling parents but they are definately on the rise, we live in a quiet area and luckily the kids are given freedom and independence.
A lot of threads about 15 to 19 year olds I've seen recently I immediately pressumed the OP had meant 5-9 and added the 1 by mistake.

YANBU.

I agree completely. FAR too much cotton wool used.

You can't really generalise although I understand what you mean.

I've 2 DDs, both could cook simple meals by the time they entered secondary school, and elaborate meals not long after that. When DD1 went to Uni I was shocked at the number of young people who could barely boil an egg and had to waste so much money on takeaways. Untidiness was another thing.

I can't understand how any parents can pamper their child to the extent of zero basic life skills. Who do they think they're going to foist their pampered entitled kids on? DDs are in their 20s in longterm relationships now. I know well they'd not have looked at any boy who couldn't do the basics and would need a maid.

Children unable to go outside to play - I'm not surprised with (a) the constantly scaremongering media & (b) mind your own business culture in real life taken to the extent that people won't see or have awareness of dodgy situations, and will over-hesitate or 2nd guess themselves re whether to get involved. I'm not blaming, just saying how it is.

I'm in London and for well over a year there's been a sex attacker targetting school girls and young women in broad daylight on busy or residential roads. Im stunned that he's got away with it for so very long... given the parking wars going on in FB forums everyone can see who's parked somewhere 2 days in a row tho...

We live in different times now so it is what it is

I had this same conversation with my son recently. My GS has just started Beavers and he said he was amazed at how much has changed. All of my children, where either in the Scouts or in the Cadets. They learnt a lot of life skills, were very independent and as young teens had to take calculated risks and shoulder responsibility for younger ones.

I think it down to two things. The world is a more dangerous place than when my children were small. The other thing is that people are more willing to to take legal action against organisations.

Children play out in our street, from age 6 or so. They do just drop in on each other too. But then we only have 10 houses here and I know all the parents.

My eldest is only 3, but I imagine she’ll join in when she’s older. I have to say though, that high profile cases like James Bulger, Madeleine McCann and April Jones make me really nervous about the day when dd does start playing out without one of her parents there. Obviously, I know those cases are extremely rare, but it still makes me nervous.

So is this a purely theoretical whinge about modern parents or are you a parent yourself? Because you haven't said a single thing about how YOU treat your own children.

So either cough up on how you treat your children, or fess up to the fact that you are doing this for an ulterior motive.

We just don't live in the type of community that we used to though, so you have to adapt your behaviour to suit the current environment. As someone up thread said, the street I grew up had very few cars and now it's x2 per household, traffic, roads and the lack of greenspace is an issue. I don't know many people where I live now so DS school friends live quite far away, popping round is not viable.
It's just different, not necessarily wrong.

Yes and look at the hundreds of historical sexual abuse cases coming to light.
Children were not as safe as people thought they were.

People will still do it but I wont take the risk with my children. I'd happily sit at a park and watch them playing with friends, children don't need the same independence as adults.

I am a parent of 2 children 9 and 11. They both played outside from the age of 6 ish and took themselves to school from 9 (the school don't allow it before year 5).

Its all very well not letting a 15 year old go to a park or on a sleepover up untill they decide to move out at 16 or move to other side of the country at 18 for uni and have no idea how to make their own decisions, deal with difficult situations or navigate outside in the dark.

I doubt that the risk of abuse is higher if you allow your child to play outside

I'd say the opposite. If a child's contact with others is always controlled and supervised they have very little opportunity to learn what is not normal and appropriate behaviour or to tell others. They also don't learn to manage novel interactions effectively before teenage years.

There's also a lot more activities and cheap holidays offered. I don't think many of my parents friends used to spend at least a holiday abroad a year. Nowadays, many parents drive (or leave) their kids to after-school clubs, enjoy cheap package holidays or budget airline tickets.
I don't think the well-off kids ever used to play in the street, it was their less wealthy counterparts that were outside. Today all the kids have a lot more opportunities and less time to play outside. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

YANBU, it's crazy how overprotective parents are. You can't wrap kids up in cotton wool just because there are some bad people out there.
I was walking to visit my friend on my own in primary school, and we would go walking around the village to visit all the fields with horses, which meant walking along the verge of busy roads, along remote footpaths, through the forest path, down the den by the river, etc. We went all over the place.
Parents need to let their kids get out and about. You can't live a life dedicated by 'what ifs'.

People hark back to the good old days but my mum grew up in the 1970s and was flashed / wanked at at least 3 times before she was 12. The rubbish dump was a favourite place to play until someone got seriously injured.

Obviously there is a happy medium but with bigger, faster and more cars on the roads and less community spirit the days of small children playing unsupervised for hours (with an older child "in charge", probably to the detriment of their own fun) are thankfully long gone. We have a big secure garden and regularly have 6 or 8 friends to play while we largely ignore them. No doubt I'd be criticised for micro-managing play dates but I have genuinely never come across a parent who plays with their children at "supervised" parties/ someone else's house. They are very much expected to buggar off and entertain themselves while the parents chat, but in a safe, car free environment.

You surely can’t live in London then. We have letters home from school saying that children aren’t to be left to go in to school alone.

And with the teenage stabbings on the rise, I think it’s justified. Although we do have plenty of police manning the bus stops after school now, so perhaps that is why you think it’s a reasonable thing to do.

I do agree that kids need downtime and some parents don't set enough time aside for themselves, they are so busy running from activity to activity. On the whole though, I think lots of parental involvement is a good thing and there is no rush to grow up. Adult life kicks in soon enough But to me having an organised life, full of "meetings" (aka "activities") is what adult life is like. The great thing about childhood is the time for amusing yourself, without having to fit in to someone else's agenda, and moving away from that is a "rush to grow up".

I think yabu to blame parents.

It's the way society has been shaped over the past 30-40 years that is at fault over parents themselves.

The media hyping up fear

Disconnection with our community / neighbours

Emergence of / reliance on online communication

Parents feeling pressure to get their kids to perform well in and out of school eg must do clubs, loads of homework

Lack of green spaces (how many people live opposite a field?!)

Much more dangerous traffic

Segregation between younger and older children, mostly as older children are under increased pressure from school

I'd say the opposite. If a child's contact with others is always controlled and supervised they have very little opportunity to learn what is not normal and appropriate behaviour or to tell others. They also don't learn to manage novel interactions effectively before teenage years.

But if no parent is there to supervise then those children will assume that the interactions they have outside are normal. It's what has happened in lots of historical cases, it's called grooming.

"Yabu - not your kids so not your business" - Don't be ridiculous. OP is having a discussion, why did you even bother to post if you're not interested, just scroll on.

OP I agree with you. I'm lucky to live on an estate that doesn't have much traffic flow. All the kids go out to play, in and out of each others houses. I've never had a 'play-date' for my DC. I think kids who don't experience this are missing out on a huge part of childhood.

Letting your kids play safely with friends in your garden is one thing, not teaching them to cook because the parents themselves live off takeaway another one entirely!

Some posters are mixing things up a bit!

Anyone who believe it's safe to allow primary school kids go on their own has never witnessed the mayhem of parents bad driving and parking around schools.

I think world has changed. When I was a child, I lived in the tight community where everyone knows everyone. It was safe for us to roam around. Now you don't even know what kind of people are living on your street.

God, I hate this sort of sneering.

I think it's a big leap from 'aren't wandering the streets' to 'are permanently in structured activities or looking at screens'. I never played out in the street as a child, but I was always in the garden with my sister, on the climbing frame or the swing in the tree or the sandpit or picking blackberries. We never did any activities except Brownies for a few years. I did do a lot more independently as a teenager, but I don't think my independence had suffered from not roaming free as a younger child.

I think recent generations are, as a general rule, better people than previous ones.. so I think whatever is happening to help that is a good thing. Maybe because kids are shown more love? Taught to care more about the world? Taught to care more about other people? I can’t see a negative side unless we’re trying to raise soldiers.

The world is different to how it used to be. I think that the internet is the best invention man has created since the wheel and roads, but with it came a safe place for weirdos to enable each other and thus create more weirdos. An unfortunate downside to an amazing creation that connects people all over the world!
Anyways so whilst in the past most weirdos would stay hidden away, now they feel slightly empowered enough for there to be reason enough to not let your kid go to the toilet alone, or let your kid play on the front street and go to the park alone, more than before.

It’s just how it is. Chances are nothing will happen but there’s more chance than before, so it’s not babying children - it’s giving them an appropriate sense of danger for this day and age

It's a balancing act. It depends on what the area is like (some are rougher, some have more busy roads etc), what the local community as a whole considers "normal", how mature the child is etc

But having said all that I have to say generally I agree. My dd is now 17 working full time and pretty much capable of running a home, whereas she has several friends who are incapable of making a cuppa because until quite recently (and some of them are 18 she's one of the younger ones) they weren't ALLOWED to use the kettle! Let alone do their own laundry or make a basic meal. Some of these are due to go off to uni in the next few months and I can already see they're REALLY going to struggle to live away from home.

Dd was always an "outdoor cat" so quite happy popping to chap friends out to play etc. Since 14 she's been getting the train to the city with other friends raised in a similar way (with the ones who weren't allowed to even get the bus into our very small, relatively safe town a mix of jealous and shocked).

In addition I've noticed the ones raised with no freedom until they hit 18/19 and leave home, when they DO get that freedom, they don't know how to handle it and go a bit nuts - all night benders, frequent ons, running out of money for bills before the end of the month and then running up debt, gambling etc

Yes we want to love and protect our DC but it's our purpose to raise them to be independent functioning adults too.

That includes using the Internet sensibly, being considerate of others, having the strength to say "no" in awkward situations, risk assessment, knowing what to do in an emergency.

"Well no, but a kidnapping is." Geez! Kidnappings are INCREDIBLY rare and again - usually carried out by someone already close to the child and usually the result of custody disputes. You can't live your life in fear of very very rare events you'd never do anything.

Traffic issues as a fear are FAR more realistic and understandable.

"A lot of threads about 15 to 19 year olds I've seen recently I immediately pressumed the OP had meant 5-9 and added the 1 by mistake." Yes! There's one just been started about "is it ok to let an 18 year old go on a 100 mile bus ride" that's an ADULT for crying out loud!

"The world is a more dangerous place than when my children were small." Except it's not - again with the possible exception of traffic issues.