Reply to Looking back, when did things change? When did we stop letting kids wander freely outside?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Looking back, when did things change? When did we stop letting kids wander freely outside?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I was born 1970 and free ranged my semi rural Massachusetts neighborhood during my early childhood and my suburban Arizona neighborhood during my middle childhood and teen years. My parents were born in the early and late 30s so their parenting mindset was formed by that context. My father roamed the streets of the south Bronx in the 30s and 40s where he likely formed the opinion that kids are resilient.

The interesting thing about this conversation and how things have changed for kids is that stranger abductions of children and stranger sexual assaults/molestations of children are still exceedingly rare, as they have always been. People became terrified by a few missing kid/murdered kid stories and playing outside became a thing of the past for far too many kids. Then cable television, home computers and video game systems locked a lot of kids into the couch potato lifestyle and parents enabled it because it’s easy. The long term effects on the mental health and physical health of kids must be obvious to us all now - exercise and time in nature are both critical to emotional and physical well being and many kids are getting little if any of each, hence mental health and suicide crises facing our kids.

If you look at the stats on who is perpetrating against our kids and who is abducting most of them - it’s family members and people in positions of authority whom we trust who are doing the vast majority of crimes against our kids and our kids are just as vulnerable to that kind of crime as they were when they also rode their bikes and ran around playing outside. It’s sad. I wouldn’t want to be a kid today. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics