Too much freedom when very young leads to low level misbehaviour...

[Homeontherangeuk]

Just a thought... We live in a very nice estate, it's very large. Our road is full of kids the same age as my dc 7 & 10... My kids rarely play out as they are very busy with activities, school & love to read/play together in the garden etc in downtime or have school friends in the garden. I'm not a fan of them playing on the road as I can't supervise & tbh don't approve of what I see... Tonight the road is full of kids, it's bucketing down, we've had 3 knock & runs plus 2 kids standing outside our house screaming my dc names... The kids are out from morning til night in term time & were out mixing the whole time during covid restrictions... They have so much freedom & very little bounderies... The families of all are very nice & we'll to but are all working from home at the minute..
My dc play out occasionally but the last time they came in as they didn't want to play "chicken" which was dancing behind any car that was reversing into it's driveway....
Aibu to think that too much freedom leads to low level delinquency? I posted about the chicken in the neighbourhood whatsapp group & also the knock & runs (I didnt mention the kids names) ... I got flamed by the majority of the group who agreed "kids are kids", "they have had a hard year" & "the kids in this estate are angels compared to most".... I am now also "that mother" on the road for pointing out my observations...

I think you give a child freedom when you can trust them to stay safe and responsible with it. Freedom to roam around a wood is great for kids. Freedom to behave in an antisocial way without repercussions due to boredom or attention seeking obviously isn't.

Some of my happiest memories from childhood are from playing out in the summer. But - I was lucky enough to live on a rural cul de sac (well, the road split and the part we played down was a dead end, turned into a walking only bit that led to a farm). There was me, my sister and one other girl and we used to play ball games in the lane. It was in sight of a lot of houses/neighbours and little danger from cars. I'd probably feel differently about it if there were fast moving cars or a lot of children, so I suppose it just varies!

But I do think playing out with no structure, having to come up with your own things to do, is really important for children.

I think circumstances have a lot to do with it. We grew up on a farm only came in for meals. VERY free range. Only way out was horseback.

No, I don't really agree, OP.

But I guess to some extent it will depend on what you count as "freedom".

Generally I think playing out for long periods is really good for kids. Most will make some poor decisions from time to time, but that's actually part of the reason it's good for them.

However, kids that aren't given any, or very poor, boundaries at home, or poor examples, will tend to behave inappropriately and make a lot of bad decisions.

Yes, have seen it myself with my oldest dc and his cousins. When supervised the kids are angels - when playing out unsupervised it was like Lord of the Flies. I had to keep dragging mine back in to prevent him being involved in some awful boys v. Girls hazing ritual. The older kids led the bad behaviour and the younger kids (mine included) joined in.

If the children can't behave themselves without a parent there, they're clearly not old enough to play out alone. End of story.

I lived in a small rural town, quite a number of housing estates. My DC were allowed to play in the local woods, go down the local lanes etc. Lots of children took buses to secondary school or walked 3 or 4 miles there. Idyllic.

However there was suddenly an epidemic of bad behaviour. Shops having to post notes "just one school child at a time". Kids out after tea climbing on the (low) supermarket roof for a dare and throwing soggy blotting paper and worse at passers by. Chapping on doors - which may just be a nuisance to the fit but frightened some of elderly, mentally fragile and disabled. They'd congregate (11-13 year olds) with fags and cans on various benches and swear at the top of their voices, leaving their rubbish behind despite bins near the benche. Urinating on the street. It wasn't freedom and it wasn't "unstructured play". It was unpleasant. And if you reprimanded the kids it was "you can''t tell me what to do" and God help you if the parent passed by "don't you talk to my kid like that". I'm not sure how many kids said no to a fag, or an alcoholic drink, or a dare to climb on the roof and throw things at people and then parlayed that into a successful ability to negotiate later on. It could have been the sudden rash of drugs coming into the area which the older teenagers were taking. We were lucky enough to "borrow" a large policeman for a month (our police station had closed and the nearest one was 12 miles away). The problem subsided after six months. I think more people calling kids out when they're doing something wrong - but it can go horribly wrong for the caller out. It helps if you know the kids and their parents.

Freedom to behave in an antisocial way without repercussions due to boredom or attention seeking obviously isn't.

Totally agree.

Speaking about children specifically (rather than teens because they've always hung about) I feel like my little group was much more inventive in the late 90s/ early 00s than my children's group now.

They seem to hang around the park and go up to the woods to climb trees etc (and probably get up to some level of nonsense once in a while). Whereas we wouldn't just be climbing trees, we'd be making rope swings and collecting wood to build a gang hut / tree house type death trap. Someone would have borrowed a hammer and off we went. There were so many games (all with completely un-PC names I won't repeat) that we all just seemed to collectively know about. We did chap doors and garden runs etc but I think that was the thrill of the chase more than boredom.

Kevin Bridges does a funny spiel about all this in A Whole Different Story. Leaving the house and just kicking a stone down the road, making up rules in your head about getting it past the next lamp post.

Are kids these days less able to deal with boredom? Are we all less able to deal with boredom? Sometimes I will watch a show on TV while also scrolling Mumsnet 🙈. But this could all just be rose tinted glasses and I don't know if my childhood was just very unique (it's the exact same area my kids are growing up in now but just feels different).