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?

'So you think the 12 yr olds shouldn't have been allowed out then? At what age should they be allowed out?' That's not what I am saying at all. Have you read my post? They should be allowed out, but Adults who steel from children at knife point should be allowed out. End of.

'And the children you mention were shouted at with 2 adults present???' yes, the 4 kids were on two seats and the adults (me and a teacher) were sitting right behind them. It didn't stop a fully grown man from shouting at them for absolutely no reason apart from scaring the living daylight out of them. Everyone on the bus was too scared to intervene directly.

So sad to see kids having some independence described as 'wandering the streets'

Actually playing in a back garden (under adult supervision) is NOT the same as independent play and gaining an understsanding of how the real world works while building relationships with peers.

think back 50 years to when kids did play outside a lot - they learnt how to get on with each other, how to cope when dealing with kids they didn't already know, they learned to assess risk in the real world. These are real and important skills that our children are not learning.

read about learning through play - children left on their own will be developing their skills in a way they simply can't just playing with their best friend in a private garden.

I'm not saying streets are safe - traffic is the single danger - but we could acknowledge that they NEED that independence as they grow and work to make our streets safer for young people (and by safe i mean safe from cars not stranger danger.)

The best protection for kids on the street is other kids, a sense of community and knowing that everyone has an eye out for each other.

Yes crunchy I do wonder what we're protecting our children from

I expect to keep DC generally safe from serious injury and death (speaking very generally). However a cut, graze, experience with a flasher or even a broken bone is probably fairly par for the course imho. All recoverable from.

My SIL and I have very different approaches to risk. She's lovely, but very anxious and a scraped knee or slightly raised fever is something to be avoided at all costs, or then clucked over, medicated and obsessed about for a few days afterwards. Unsurprisingly her kids aren't very resilient. My approach is to throw the kids much more in the deep end and see if they sink or swim. They mostly swim and if they sink, they're either encouraged to get over it or (obviously) mopped up if necessary.

Yes absolutely to a sense of community. well said waterrat.

I don't really get the "someone flashed at me, so I'm never lettindg my kids out" mentality.

So what? Someone lunged at me when I was out for dinner! Does that mean no-one should go to restaurants? No, these are life experiences - you can never protect people from encountering shady characters their whole life. That's just life. Keeping kids indoors isn't going to solve any problems, those kids will be the first to shag about and overdose on MDMA at uni.

Sense of community is great, but it's thing of the past in most places these days, even in a small town where I live.

"Yabu - not your kids so not your business."

We all live in society together. How the current generation is being brought up will affect us all.

Waterrat they also have to be aware of stranger danger, there are people out there who would want to harm them, and they have to be prepared for that. Ds is 6 imho too young to go out on his own, we live on a main road, but hopefully in a few years time I would like him to go to the local park on his own with his friends depending on level of maturity. To be honest, most of my independence was when I hit 13, going on the bus shopping with friends, meeting up at a certain place with friends. Going by tube ice skating with my friend at 14.

I don't recall being allowed without an adult at primary school age, and this was over 30 years ago.

I haven't rtft but I have to agree to a certain extent, we are babying are young people today.
However, as one of the 50 year olds described as having this wonderful time of playing outdoors, our kids can't do this as much now due to safety.
Only the other day, a child was approached by a man in a van, at the primary school near us.
She was walking home on her own, so was targeted.
When we were little we all walked to school together, we called for all the kids we knew and walked together, even sahm's let their dc walk with friends, I was 5 when I started.
You couldn't allow this now as most are ferried in cars and there would be too many walking on their own from different directions for it to be safe.

yolo I agree. Better to teach kids what to do if this happens. And it sadly will probably happen to young women.

I don't think a child having never peeled vegetables before at 11 or so is a particularly good example. The first vegetable peeling and spaghetti cooking I did was at Guides, and that was 30 years ago. Surely that's the sort of thing Guides is for. My parents don't really cook, just heat things up. I can cook pretty well, and experience at Guides and school helped.

I'm not sure my DDs are particularly good at peeling vegetables. I used to get them involved when they were little but they aren't particularly interested now. They will have a lifetime of chores to do as an adult, I don't particularly much care whether they do much around the house other than cleaning their own rooms for now.

Also the parents who don't let their kids out because they are worried about them experiencing negative things, are far more likely to have older teenagers who won't tell them if anything negative happens. That does make them more vulnerable.

It can go on a lot of things, the area the child lives in, are there main roads nearby, do they live in a " rough" area as opposed to a nice area, and the general maturity of the child taken into account. So it's unfair to just say the same thing for everyone.

How the current generation is being brought up will affect us all.

I agree. And it might be that they're overprotected. I guess what I don't like is any sense that our generation is perfect, that our parents got everything right.

If you look back, people have been complaining about the feckless, useless, over-indulged 'youth of today' for hundreds of years.

It is tricky, I'd love my children to be outside more - but we live in a built up town, there are cars, vans - and speeding drivers - everywhere.

I'd love to see our council organize car-free days or pedestrian only evenings or something. I'd love to see the people who park dangerously and the speeding drivers to be penalized but they don't seem to be. Until then we're a bit stuck.

"Only the other day, a child was approached by a man in a van, at the primary school near us"

This almost certainly didn't happen. Not saying you made it up but this is one of those things that is always being reported and always turns out not to be true.

I think we are doing the opposite and asking kids to grow up too fast. There is immense pressure on children to achieve certain milestones by a certain age at school, and to even go to school and start formal learning at all far too early for many. Many are starting GCSE studies a year or more earlier than they used to. They have to deal with complex grammar in the infants and have national tests on something practically every year. It's too much.

Well I think that accompanying my young child and constantly explaining to him how I am assessing our environment and making decisions may well teach him more independent skills than leaving him to his own devices.

Yolo, are you suggesting that a good stabbing or encounter with a rapist might steer them away from sex and drugs when they get older? 😂

"How the current generation is being brought up will affect us all.

I agree. And it might be that they're overprotected. I guess what I don't like is any sense that our generation is perfect, that our parents got everything right."

Oh yes, but we can talk about what's good and what's bad of different times.

Plus the access to technology and all that brings with it. Unsuitable content they may be exposed to.

Social media promotes lots of urban myths and scares. I wish I had a £1 for every time someone had told me about a car with a child in the back stolen at a local named petrol station or a kid being pulled into a van in a named local street. All bollocks.

The reason we know about awful things that happen to kids like stranger murder, is because it is rare. I also suspect there are less flashers about because the police now, unlike in the past, do take this seriously. Yes kids may have a negative experience like having their phone robbed. They need to know what to do if this happens. Not a reason to lock them up until they are 25.

Plus apparently many are reaching puberty faster due to obesity. Literally growing up much faster. How fast do you want them to grow up? Do want want a fully formed 40 year old straight out of the womb?

I kind of agree and kind of don't.

I had loads of independence when I was growing up in the UK & US and feel sorry that my children haven't had the same.

On the other hand, I was once approached by a man who tried to convince me to go down a deserted track with him in the US and who held my arm quite forcefully - nothing good was going to happen there but fortunately I had dropped left my coat in a friend's car and her parents were calling me back which startled the man and I ran and ran. It was terrifying but I didn't fully process the danger until I was a teen. When living semi rurally in the UK as an 9-10 year old there were a couple of local 'flashers', we never told parents about them and treated them as a bit of a joke but I don't know how I feel about my DC having the same kind of experiences.

I live in a very urban area now and it's actually the traffic and amount of parked cars reducing kids visibility which stops me giving my children the same freedom.

OP, some of this is system related. We've just had notifications from the school, under the guise of safeguarding, that children should not be dropped off until 8.40am and the school gates will be closed until then. They apparently had children left unsupervised from 8.20am onwards. I know a few eyebrows that were raised at this and why children being unsupervised in the school playground before school, when DH's great aunt was walked to school age 5 once and thereafter walked alone wit hthe other kids and DH and I both walked to school without adults in KS2, but DS school expects them all to be in breakfast club or supervised by an adult until they go in to register. How do you teach kids to cross roads, go to shops alone etc. if this is the starting point of their school?

Equally though I agree with Bettyfood's point - compared with the school work done at young ages overseas, we expect far too much intellectually, but then don't allow freedoms that should come along with that level of knowledge.