Is it possible to still have a "Huckleberry Finn" childhood?

[EddieIzzardismyhero]

Have just finished reading "21st Century Boys" and found it a very interesting, if somewhat depressing read.

I have two sons, both under two at the moment so this is not something pressing. But I found myself musing on the type of childhood I would be able to offer them in comparison to the one I enjoyed myself.

I was brought up in the 70s in a small town in the west country and I remember long sunny days spent exploring the local fields and forests, hours spent playing out without adult supervision, running out of the house first thing in the morning and coming back only when you were hungry . . . Does this still exist anywhere in this country anymore?

We live in a market town in the SE of England. We live in a cul-de-sac but rarely see children playing out, partly because moronic drivers race up and down the road as if they're competing in F1 . We have lots of parks and open spaces but children are rarely unsupervised.

I would love to give my boys the kind of childhood I enjoyed but is it possible now? Does anyone else do it? Would I be on my own (and hence my children would be on their own too)?

Interested in your thoughts.

thats a shame Cory
maybe we need to start these conversations with people. We may find more like minded thinkers who are afraid to let thei own out because of lack of numbers.
A freedom directory

I was telling DH about this thread and chatting about both our free childhoods but he reminded me that if 11 in 11 million are abducted in the UK every year, that's a 1 in a million chance of your child being abducted. We play the lottery every saturday and there's a one in a 13 million chance to win and we still play! That's why we don't let our DCs roam unsupervised.

My 5 year old dd does. We live on an army base which is the size of a small town and has beautiful countryside including a river, lots of wildlife etc.

I love the fact she is able to have this kind of freedom but it will pose a problem if we move and have to live off base as she'd really struggle not to be allowed to play out all day.

weepootle - we've had that until last year when we moved in our own house and I feel much less 'secure' without a guy on the gate!
we spent our weekends, biking round the airfield, the kids playing in the square with their friends and feeling very safe at all times. Life is very different now though, even though we live next door to the play park, I still wouldn't let them play there alone. I think they nag me because they feel hard done by not being allowed out and away on their own.

Carmen, it isn't rose-tinted nostalgia though - and constantly supervised activities are very very different from allowing children the freedom to roam. You must live in a very dangerous part of the world so I can understand your risk aversion, but here child abductions are incredibly rare and most childhood abuse/injuries happen in the child's own home.

I'm not for one minute suggesting we send our kids out to play on railways/building sites/farm machinery (none of which I did as a child), I'm talking about woods and fields. They hold their own dangers of course but my friend's DS broke his elbow last week falling off a climbing frame while she was a foot away from him, so all activities bring risks.

Btw, I love the idea of a freedom directory! Maybe we should ask MN to make their next campaign .

I am risk averse and, EddieIIMH, I do know that abductions are incredibly rare (and I used to train adults about child protection, so agree with your statistics) but every now and then, I get a shudder of 'what if'.

My DD is 3.5 so am a way off letting her out all day, and where possible, I do try and let her explore when she's not aware that I'm keeping tabs on her, but if she's in the house and I'm in the garden (for example) I lock the front door - just in case as I couldn't live with myself if someone just did take her - and it does happen (albeit very rarely) and with tragic consequences.

I grew up in a very rural area, lived on a farm, was allowed to wander where I liked and look back on it as an extremely positive childhood. But we now live in a mostly urban environment, and I just wouldn't feel safe about her spending loads of time on her own - take me back to that tiny village in Kent and no problems at all, she could start to be on her own a lot more already!!

Our neighbour, however, has an 11 year old and an 8 year old and she lets them do what they like from early morning until dinner time - they're out, unsupervised, swearing and generally up to no good (the younger one used to have a fascination with playing with my then 2 year old and I was quite tense that he was acting out power issues with her as I had to intervene strongly with him) - they have no productive input from adults or role models and this sort of freedom I consider to be quite unhealthy.

I also used to work in residential child care, and have a children's home on our street - I am wary of their boys as I think I have better insight than most into the type of children that may live there.....

We've just built a tree house platform 9 ft up in some woodland with a handrail round, it's not quite finished yet but DD was desperate to show it to her just turned five year old friend. The friend gacve me a detailed discrription of what further handrails would be needed in order to make it safe. I understand but felt rather sad that us grown ups had turned her into a mini health and safety officer.

I live in a rural market town in england and I see kids playing out on the street, roaming across the fields, building dens and paddling in the river. I think it is posisble to give your kids a 'huck Finn' or swallows and amazon childhood (the good parts) but it does mean you may have to move areas! It also requires parents to have a different approach to risk. I know my son will at some point probably fall in the river, break his arm and burn his hand on the campfire... but I work on the basis of minimising the imapct of the event not trying to stop it happening at all.

I work hard at teaching him practical skills needed for an outdoors lifestyle and I trust my neighbours, the residents of the surrounding area and my own kids good judgement more than I trust media hype about the regretable and horrific but statistically very few child kidnapping/ abuse by strangers cases.

Carmen, might there not have been an alternative to this: sending children out in wild areas but making sure they have the training and sense not to do bloody silly things.

I had a very free childhood in Sweden and Swedish children still seem to live in a very similar way. We knew not to play on railway lines- any child who did that would have known exactly how stupidly and dangerously they were behaving. We knew how to do life-saving from an early age, how to look out for signs of hypothermia or frostbite in a friend, how to rescue someone who'd fallen through the ice without putting our own lives at risk, we were taking boats out on our own at least from the age of 10 or 11. Noone I knew ever had a serious accident.

The area you live in sounds horrendous but that doesn't mean that everybody has to live as if their own area was the same. We've never had any abductions around here in the UK, and I certainly don't know of any children being abducted in the parts of Sweden I used to live in either. I would never get the shopping done in winter time if I couldn't walk out after dark; in fact, no woman would be able to hold down a job if that was the case.

Surely, the sensible way is to do a risk assessment of the actual area you live in and then set your sights accordingly. If you live in an area with known dangers, you adjust accordingly. But you don't have to take account of dangers that are very rare in your own part of the world. I assume you don't spend a lot of time worrying about frostbite?

The fact that one in a million children in the UK is abducted is meaningless. Those statistics are taken in a society where parents are extremely watchful and where children aren't generally allowed out of sight. It's not easy to abduct children in the UK because they're never alone. If you're proposing a society where children regularly play outside unsupervised, it's a different environment and the statistics may be drastically different.

One of the reasons abduction/rape/murder rates ARE considerably higher here is because in certain communities, it's considered ok to let children walk or play in quiet places alone. We have the death penalty so it's not like the authorities are lax on such crime.

Think instead about figures for women being raped/murdered/abducted. Yes, it's still not hugely likely to happen but numbers are considerably higher - I would guess because women are more likely to be out alone than children, thus presenting more opportunity.

I don't think random rapists care particularly about age.

Regarding non-abduction dangers... to be fair, although kids did romp around horrendously dangerous places when I was about 9 or so, on the whole the dangers they encountered tended more towards drugs, underage drinking and glue-sniffing. Mainly out of boredom. And because no-one was around to stop them. It really wasn't idyllic.

I think it is human nature to look back with rose tinted spectacles. Children now are not going to look back and see their childhoods in a negative light on the end of a leash. They may look back feeling pampered and cared for even if life was pretty restrictive.

A lot of families in past generations were larger, so there was less time to arrange a taxi service for each of the children for all of their after-school activities. Life changes in bits and pieces, and we like to think it's better now, although it's probably just the same.

In terms of my own freedom, I had lots. In other ways, I had a miserable time. I think most people try to strike a balance. Balance shifts, and we fall over. Lots.

helyg, has it right! the older children looked out for the younger ones when I was young. We were allowed to roam in the school holidays and had great fun. I recently walked out through the local sandpits and the fields by the river and thought, This was our playground when I was young. I do know a couple of mums who give their children some freedom but most children I know have their every waking hour supervised. Often doing activities mum or dad have chosen for them. Like many people who work with children I feel sad that they are not encouraged to use their imagination.

I have read Toxic Childhood and agree with much of what it says.

carmen, the statistics for child abduction in the UK haven't changed in 50 years - it's nothing to do with how much our children are watched, it simply isn't a big risk. It wasn't in my childhood, it isn't now. The media is what has changed - not the risk.

So it's not just a Western cultural thing then hopefor, it seems to be peculiar to the UK and US judging by this thread so far.

The US I can understand a little bit more as it does have some appalling stats for violence (although I appreciate it is a big country and lots of places are probably just as safe, if not safer, than some of our big cities) and they do love their cars, but the UK is more of an anomaly?

What went wrong?

I think our approach to social responsibility; families and parenting values/culture within the UK - that's what went wrong!

The OP and the author are correct - curtailing childrens' freedom is a big problem. The more books written about it the better, frankly, maybe people will start to take notice.

I saw a presentation at a medical conference recently, showing that the range where children are allowed to play out has shrunk dramatically over three generations. Our grandparents roamed for several miles, on average. Us parents were commonly allowed to play out in a smaller area. And today's children are lucky if they get to the end of their own street.

That echoes my own experience - ds is lucky compared to some of his friends as we live in a cul de sac where children do play together outside, but they aren't allowed out of the road. I roamed for miles in a small village in West Yorkshire in the 70s, only coming home for food. One of the differences is that as children we knew we could rely on any adult to help us if we got into difficulties - and equally would be told off by any passing adult if we were being naughty. That kind of society doesn't exist any more - look at the occasional outraged posts you get on here if someone dares to tell off someone else's child. And all the ideas about stranger danger - yes, children do need to know about safe touch and unsafe touch, but I think they are on balance in more danger from failing to seek help when they need it than from being harmed by a stranger.

Quite apart from it being an obviously good thing for children to play freely, there are clear health and developmental benefits. Not just from physical activity but from contact with nature and the living world.

HopefortheBest makes an excellent point. We stayed with cousins in Germany a couple fo years ago, and one of our kids went to school there for the day to experience what it was like. All the kids were aged 7 and walking to school in central Munich. You'd probably get a social worker coming around your house if you tried that here.

Indeed when we lived in Battersea with DD, I used to let her walk to the next road to call for her friend, and the friend's parents told me off for doing this! I also used to let her ride her bike a bit on her own on Wandsworth Common at the age of 10 (I would cross the busy road with her and then let her have a bit of freedom on the grassy area), and some eyebrows were raised about that too. It beggars belief, really.

When I was a classroom teacher, a lot of my teenage female pupils were absolutely terrified of the world, and I had to remind them on more than one occasion that 99.999999% of people are fundamentally OK, and they were unlikely to ever come across the remanining percentage. I used to pose the question, "If I left my baby out in a pram in the middle of a shopping mall unattended, what would probably happen to him?" The girls always responded that someone would take care of the baby, and make sure he had everything he needed before calling for professional help. This helped them realise that the world is not full of evil rapists around every corner waiting to abduct and torture them; in fact it's a extraordinarily civil society we live in, and we need to remember that.

I agree very much that the curtailing of children's freedom under the guise of reducing risk is a huge problem today.

One of the reasons I do not wish my DD to eat at the school canteen is so that she can have free run of the park for an hour and half at lunch time, rather than spend an extra hour in her classroom and 20 minutes at the sandpit with 100s of other children under close supervision.

The more of the world you can explore on your own terms, the better, IMO!

My DD has been left alone at home for 10 minutes or so since she was just 4. But she has always been sensible.

Sadly, the actual video of this commercial has disappeared but there's some commentary here (I wouldn't be surprised if this site was run by a MNer!)

In the US, this commercial is on all the time, showing a worried mother sending her early teenage daughter shopping with friends... in an indoors mall where she is hanging around at the top of an escalator. So what does worried mother do? Issue the teenager with a 'Family Locater' tracking device in a Verizon phone.

That's how bad it is in America.

edam, your point about children not knowing where to go for help is a good one - people just don't want to get involved either. I was at a toddler group this week (quite a larage on run in a church hall) and there was a little boy sat in the corner sobbing his heart out and everyone was ignoring him!

I went and asked him what the matter was and helped him find his mum - not a big deal but I would loved to have known why no one else felt able to get involved! Loads of other people had noticed him and were asking each other who he was with etc but no one approached him!

Hopefor, I have also heard the link between risk taking and entrepreneurs - in fact I think Sue Palmer mentions it in her book - very interesting point.

Im jumping in again abit-I really think that getting to know as many neighbours as possible, and caring about your community is a great way to get more freedom for your kids, and yes, safety in no's for kids to go out together.
However,as a pedsestrian and a driver in N.London, the roads are NOT safe, there are so many nutters who drive TOO fast, and just want to get where they want to go, narrowly missing other peopleat times when kids want to got to school.I think people dont think 'outside' of their cars. Im on HIGH alert for the car thats gonna mount the pavement, beause it HAPPENS.
In Japan, walking to school with other school mates is the norm from about 6yrs, and cycling together with pedestrians on pavements.All calm, and very sedate,and really goodb fun!mum can take 2 kids, one at the front and at the back-sit up and beg type bikes.Wish we had that here instead ot all the anti-bike hysteria.