Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This might be specific to where you live. In DC, tons of kids, starting in middle school, ride public buses and Metro to school, often making a transfer or walking a mile or so. Think kids on Capitol Hill commuting to upper NW. They navigate around to get to their after school activities on their own. My kids walk a mile or more to visit friends or go to a specific store, or they might ride bikes or take a bus.

They have so much more freedom than I did as a middle schooler growing up in suburbia.

We drive so little that it's going to be a challenge to get hours behind the wheel to get a license.

I think this is right. Doesn't even have to be DC. We live in Arlington and most kids here by middle school (6th grade for us) are trending way more independent. Walking home from school, walking and biking to friends houses, meeting up to do things independently, taking a bus to get places (which is free for them).

I think this is something to think about very intentionally as a parent and there are parents doing developmentally normal letting the strings go gradually.

Anonymous wrote:Read some of Lenore Skenazy’s writing on this. That and Jonathan Chait’s book, The Anxious Generation, have motivated me to push against this trend and to give my kids a lot of autonomy and independence in the real world. This is to build confidence but also make the real world more interesting than the virtual one. My 11 y/o gets off the bus in the afternoon and goes to the park with friends. She often walks around our very walkable DC neighborhood by herself or with friends and goes to stores by herself, including to pick up milk etc for us. This summer I’m going to let her start riding the metro or DC bus by herself. To each their own but I am already seeing so much confidence in my kid and it has helped massively with her anxiety. She feels competent and happy. Eliminating all risk is impossible and attempting to do so just creates other risks, like getting sucked into online worlds, IMHO.

Anonymous wrote:Social media and the constant reposting of stories has made it seem as though the world is more dangerous.

We used to watch the news in the evening or read the paper and you sometimes saw a bad thing happened story. Now you log on and can see 100s of a bad thing happened story and it is shared and posted over and over.

The world is a little more dangerous in that an increased population means more cars on the road, cars are faster, people are more distracted in their cars, etc. But people are still people, they aren't more dangerous.

Many people do not know actual facts or statistics. They base their sense of danger on their perception, not on reality.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hasn’t changed here. I don’t let my kids walk as we know several kids hit and severely injured and two died from cars.

So you think that not allowing your tween to walk on sidewalks on a residential road, without a parent, will protect them? Don't you want them to learn some awareness of pedestrian safety in the lowest risk way possible- walking on a sidewalk, followed by crossing at an intersection with both a walk sign AND an adult crossing guard? My kid is perfectly aware now, at age 11, that cars will sometimes rush through that right turn on red even when the walk sign is up and a "NO TURN ON RED" sign is in their face, and to always check the turn lane before crossing. And it's lower risk than it will be when he's older because now, in elementary, a crossing guard is right there and she will whistle and hold out her arms and not let the kids start to cross if she sees a car trying to sneak through a light that just turned red.

Imagine if your kid hadn't been in these situations and then suddenly, at 18, has free reign to wander around with airpods in and assumes that when that walk sign turns on, he's free to stroll out into the road without looking.

Don't do them a disservice by not teaching them this stuff! And you teach them by letting them do it, in a controlled way!

This is a really important point. Kids who are overprotected end up LESS SAFE because they don't understand how to assess risk correctly. Protecting them by limiting them is an illusion.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hasn’t changed here. I don’t let my kids walk as we know several kids hit and severely injured and two died from cars.

So you think that not allowing your tween to walk on sidewalks on a residential road, without a parent, will protect them? Don't you want them to learn some awareness of pedestrian safety in the lowest risk way possible- walking on a sidewalk, followed by crossing at an intersection with both a walk sign AND an adult crossing guard? My kid is perfectly aware now, at age 11, that cars will sometimes rush through that right turn on red even when the walk sign is up and a "NO TURN ON RED" sign is in their face, and to always check the turn lane before crossing. And it's lower risk than it will be when he's older because now, in elementary, a crossing guard is right there and she will whistle and hold out her arms and not let the kids start to cross if she sees a car trying to sneak through a light that just turned red.

Imagine if your kid hadn't been in these situations and then suddenly, at 18, has free reign to wander around with airpods in and assumes that when that walk sign turns on, he's free to stroll out into the road without looking.

Don't do them a disservice by not teaching them this stuff! And you teach them by letting them do it, in a controlled way!

Anonymous wrote:Your teen will find their people — which will include parents that parent like you.

For example, my daughter is friends with the girls whose parents are generally pretty strict on tech, but fairly free range. The girls did generally have Apple Watches in 6th grade. Some didn’t have actual phones until 8th grade. None of them have social media as 8th graders.

But these friends were allowed to come to our beach house for long weekends when the parents barely knew us. They did likely check behind the scenes with parents who had known us since elementary, but they were cool with us taking their kids three hours away for three nights. I was super clear with them before the kid came for the first time, that we let kids be pretty free range at the beach. They can swim without an adult, but no one swims alone. They don’t swim without a red flag warning. They can walk the beach on their own and get up early and go get breakfast by themselves. These are all girls who could go to the mall together on a Saturday afternoon with no parent starting in 6th grade. These are girls who have gone to the pool with no parents since 6th grade. Not my kid, but two of them go on long runs by themselves (they are into track). No one freaks out if these girls are hanging out at one house and the parents leave the girls at the house while the parents go out to dinner.

Middle school is where relationships are built on common interests. Your free range kid with find other free range kids because they will want to do similar things together — beach, mall, whatever the activity of their choice is without having some random parent hanging out all the time.

Anonymous wrote:Hasn’t changed here. I don’t let my kids walk as we know several kids hit and severely injured and two died from cars.

Anonymous wrote:This might be specific to where you live. In DC, tons of kids, starting in middle school, ride public buses and Metro to school, often making a transfer or walking a mile or so. Think kids on Capitol Hill commuting to upper NW. They navigate around to get to their after school activities on their own. My kids walk a mile or more to visit friends or go to a specific store, or they might ride bikes or take a bus.

They have so much more freedom than I did as a middle schooler growing up in suburbia.

We drive so little that it's going to be a challenge to get hours behind the wheel to get a license.

Anonymous wrote:My oldest is 11, so I'm barely entering the tween zone with him. Maybe my question will come off the same way questions from parents of babies come off to me, when they're like "I'll never let my child go to bed past 8pm" and "just offer them a rainbow of foods and they'll eat what their body requires, it's not that hard for me to do this with my 8 month old, you're just lazy!"

My question is basically, why are teens not allowed the same freedoms and responsibilities that we had when we were younger? I see on this board, and in some cases with the teenagers in our neighborhood, that they aren't allowed to drive more than a few hours away, aren't allowed to babysit past 10pm even on weekends, have parents stay at their sports practices, have their parents coordinating their college apps for them, etc. Obviously this stuff is a few years off for me, but what's changed? I let my 11 year old walk the half a mile to school alone with a friend, on a residential 25mph road with sidewalks and a crossing guard present at the 4 way road intersection he needs to cross to get to the school. Even if it's cold, or rainy, they walk. But barely anyone else does this even on gorgeous days. Kids get driven the half a mile by their parents. On rainy or cold days, the line to drop off in the morning is blocking traffic because it stretches down the 4 lane road that the school is on. Next year they'll be at middle school and the middle school is a mile away as opposed to a half mile away, but also completely on residential roads with one street crossing at a traffic light and his friend's mom has said she won't allow her kid to walk to middle school because of that street crossing. It's disappointing to me but am I in the minority here that I think that walk would be safe and fine, with a friend, at age 12?

Anonymous wrote:This might be specific to where you live. In DC, tons of kids, starting in middle school, ride public buses and Metro to school, often making a transfer or walking a mile or so. Think kids on Capitol Hill commuting to upper NW. They navigate around to get to their after school activities on their own. My kids walk a mile or more to visit friends or go to a specific store, or they might ride bikes or take a bus.

They have so much more freedom than I did as a middle schooler growing up in suburbia.

We drive so little that it's going to be a challenge to get hours behind the wheel to get a license.