Do you know where your kids are?

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-And is that always a good thing? asks an article on the NPR website.

The point is that modern American parents are preoccupied with the safety of their offspring, which leads them to allow them less and less freedom to roam about and entertain themselves with their peers.

Even when I was young, my parents deplored the fact that the neighbors' children went around roaming, and spent very little time at home.  My younger brother came under criticism for going off without telling our parents where he was going.  (I was, too.  I was almost 16 before I was allowed to go off without prior permission.)

Read the article; it describes the phenomenon a lot better than I can.

Well, I believe that limited freedom is here to stay; it is a side-effect of most families having to have two parents working in order to maintain the lifestyle they want.  The adults want a lifestyle that requires more expensive material goods, but increasingly the kids want more expensive toys too, and parents who spend a lot of money on themselves are in no position to deny the little people (or the not so little people) their fabulous playthings.  (The quality of the merchandise does reflect on the quality of the parents, right?  Or is that too crass?)  Also, I have to confess, many parents work so hard to try to ensure the future of their offspring by buying them an expensive education, to put them ahead of the competition (or because the child wants it, or the child needs it, academically). Sometimes the only good education that parents can arrange for their kids is an expensive one, but in my humble opinion, the converse is not necessarily true.  (My daughter might argue that a more prestigious education might assure her more of the things she really needs, but it is hard to decide such questions even with 20/20 hindsight.)

But I want to argue --with the article-- that a certain amount of uncertainty in our knowledge about what the kids are doing is probably a good thing.  I remember going off one summer, in my rebellious period, and the adults who were with me at that time begging me to write home, or call home, and just tell them where I was.  I did not have wheels, but I walked hundreds of miles, to save the bus fare, so I could spend the money on the grub I really liked, and other things my parents could not afford.

A question to those of my readers who grew up in modest circumstances: did your humble beginnings make you a big spender as an adult?  I suppose most of us would say no: I, for instance, feel that I'm a fairly restrained consumer, but I have an enormous collection of fiction, which must have cost me several thousand dollars when I got them new (many of the books are from used book stores), and a collection of music recordings that must have cost me twice as much.  On the other hand, my stereo system is about $1,500, and my TV is about another $300, a gift from our daughter.  I suspect that many families own more expensive systems.

We live in a $100,000 home (which was a lucky buy), and drive cars each worth about $9,000 new, back in 2004.  So in some ways we live frugally, but money runs through my fingers like sand, I have to admit!

Kids who are allowed a lot of freedom to roam probably need fewer toys to keep them entertained.  But you have less control over who they hang out with.  The band of friends your kids connect up with is such an enormous influence over their lives.  Unfortunately you just can't over-engineer this peer group; it mostly just happens, based on where you live, and the things you do as parents (e.g. Church, etc).

When our only child was young--four or five-- we took her first to Ballet class, which she loved.  Then we took her to play Ping-Pong, which a local parent was organizing, to keep the kids in his neighborhood off the streets (fairly successfully, I might add).  Then came Judo and Gymnastics, which she kept up for a long time.  Then came Girl Scouts, and Piano lessons, and finally Odyssey of the Mind, and Tennis, and now that I think of it, Computer Club.

You must get the impression that this kid was a dynamo.  Actually, she didn't know any better; any time I said: let's try this, she was all for it!  I guess it meant something interesting to do, and new kids to meet.

Some colleagues and I have a discussion going at present, and we agree that these adult-supervised activities are no substitute for things the kids run off somewhere and dream up to do by themselves.  Luckily, each of the activities above got our kid a new collection of buddies, and she was very much into introducing each gang to the rest, which meant that they spent weekends organizing get-togethers, and that was a good thing.

Perhaps the most amazing thing she did was to agree to a paper-route when she was twelve, where she made mountains of friends --both kids and adults, not to mention a dozen pets, dogs and cats-- whom I knew only very slightly, or not at all.

Being a girl, of course, she did not have the freedom that a boy would have demanded, and got.  This is a miserable aspect of our society, which I deplore, which some girls transcend, and others unfortunately do not.  Someday girls growing up can do exactly the same things as little guys do, with no threat to their persons either from predatory adults or anything else.

The important thing is not that our girl was any good at the things she did --she was good at some things, but not at others-- but that she got a wide circle of friends, some close, and some not so close.  Temperamentally, I suppose, some kids are more comfortable dealing with no-so-close friends (boys are a little better at this, I think, but I could be wrong) than others.  And let's face it, this is an important first step to getting a wide enough circle of friends with whom you can do something interesting that does not involve adult supervision, or expensive equipment.

Why is this important?  I think it builds the important characteristic of being self-directed.  A self-directed kid is just so much more likely to be a success than a kid who needs supervision.  It turned out that my brother whom I mentioned earlier was self-directed to a fault, and had the most wild and crazy life you could possibly imagine, and was, by my measures, the greatest success of all of us (only limited by extreme poor health).

My wife busted loose the summer of her first year in college, and went on a trip to the Middle East.  She never looked back; she doesn't quite understand exactly how that experience made her the person she is, but it is clear that being on her own, away from her family, made her the self-directed person she is now.

Reading the comments to the NPR piece shows the enormous variety of attitudes to this question: whether to "free range" your kids, and if so, to what extent.  It all depends very strongly on where you live, and the opinions of some of these NPR listeners may or may not be relevant to you.  But the decadent society in which we live influences the lives of our families so strongly, in ways that neither we nor society can control very well.

But other things are emerging that help things in the right direction, provided we use them well: cell phones, which enable us to keep in touch with junior, but also use like a leash, which is not good.  There are lots of issues.  The evolution of our attitudes towards alternative lifestyles has, I believe, actually made the world a safer place.  On the other hand, sensationalized news reporting is not a blessing.

[To be continued, possibly.]

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