independence emerging through the haze

[calimac]

One on my reading list reports that his wife sent their 6-year-old daughter on an errand to the local shop, about 2 minutes' walk away on a quiet street.

That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.

As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.

I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.

And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.

There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.

The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)

Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.

Comments

[sartorias]

Generalizing, kids who want freedom find their way to it, and figure it out with peers. I know we sure did--and we had limits that today's parents would report us for. (I was seven when I walked three miles to the intercity bus stop, took a bus to the border of Inglewood and Watts, walked to the orthodontist, then reversed that, checking into school where they accepted the ortho's note without a blink. That year I also began taking our little red wagon to the local store half a mile away, getting everything on my mother's list, including Dad's cartons of Lucky Strikes and Mom's Kents, putting it all on Mom's tab, and then lugging it all home. We all waled to school and back, only three blocks at the one house, three miles from junior high on.

But when we first began riding bikes, we were not allowed to cross any street. We were supposed to only ride around the block. Ironically, when both my brothers were hit by cars (the elder brother actually run over, breaking one arm and one leg) he was running across the street to the Helms truck.). We rode for miles and miles without our dad ever knowing. And as a teen, I figured out how to bus to Mytho meetings--which included a lengthy wait to change buses on Skid Row downtown LA. I just didn't tell my parents where I was changing the bus. (I stayed overnight at my grandmother's and reversed that the next day--I would not have tried a wait on Skid Row for a bus at 11:00 at night.)

When I was a teacher, I was nearly fired by an irate parent whose little princess was only permitted to see G-rated films. I had showed the kids the first half of Camelot when we did a King Arthur unit. (I got the film off the director's library shelf, a personal friend of the mom, heh.) Anyway, I knew that the princess and her buddies were watching "Beaches" and the like on their sleepovers, once the parents were zonked. Never told on them.

I think that kids not learning how to cook and so forth might be an artifact of two working parents, which usually translated out, at least before 2000 to Mom and Dad both having jobs, but Mom had to come home and still do all cooking, cleaning, and housework, because that was how she was raised. And he was raised to be clueless about women's work. (Personal experience.) I would take stabs at the slow process of teaching my reluctant kids to cook, but mostly I was exhausted, constantly pressed for time, and it was easier to just do it all, and say, "you'll learn when you're on your own." I did teach them to do their own laundry, though; I was responsible for hanging out, bringing in, and drying the entire family's laundry by the time I was nine, so I had no problem with teaching my kids as soon as they were tall enough to reach the washing machine controls that if they wanted clean clothes, here are the magic machines to make that happen.

But mostly I suspect that time pressure is at fault for not having the time and energy to teach a lot of independent tasks .

[calimac]

The area where I biked for pleasure was hilly, with scattered homes and not much traffic. But even so, driving around there in adulthood I was shocked at how narrow and twisty the roads were and how I got away with it as a kid on a bicycle.

I got my cooking lessons in casual chunks from about the age of ten on, whenever my mother wasn't too busy. She bought me a child's cookbook and we worked through simple recipes.

Laundry is something else she taught me, this as a deliberate lesson before I went off to college. Instead of dumping my dirties in the family hamper, I kept them separate for a week and then we went off to the laundromat, to replicate the conditions I'd encounter on my own.

A very important skill my parents didn't teach me but my school did, and which I took at my mother's insistence: touch-typing. I would have been about 15. I got good and fast enough at it to take secretarial temp jobs in college. I couldn't do that now, my fingers would fall off, but thanks to computers it's been decades since I've had to retype anything of any length, and composing at the keyboard requires lots of pauses for thinking, at least for me.

[sartorias]

Typing was required for girls (whose future would be secretary, teacher, or nurse if not wife) but I remember three or four boys in our class. It never occurred to me to ask why, but I think back and think: smart guys, or else smart parents giving them advice to get in that typing while they could,

[wild_patience]

Typing was a graduation at my (all-girls Catholic) high school. I thought that was very sensible. Most of us were going to college and would need to submit typewritten papers. (I had a friend in college who had deliberately not learned to type so she wouldn't be automatically put in a secretarial position. She had to pay other people to type her papers and work around their schedule.) It was a job skill for those who didn't go to college, and we had no idea in 1973 that computers would take over our lives and you would need it for pretty much everything. (When I was working, my co-workers were always amazed at how fast I could type. Ha! I used to type on a manual typewriter. A computer keyboard is a dream to type on.)

[sartorias]

Heh! I was a good typist, but once I was out of college, I had to leave behind my mother's ancient typewriter (the ribbon of which had never been changed since she was in high school in 1050) so I wrote all my papers, including grad school, in calligraphy, as I couldn't afford to rent one, either. It was such a joy to get my own Selectric years later, when I was out in the world! I thought that was the ultimate in typewriter heaven!

[calimac]

I was certainly not the only boy in my typing class, but I don't remember the sex ratio. The teacher was a man. He was in fact a former English teacher who'd been demoted for incompetence, proof that the Peter Principle doesn't always apply.

[wild_patience]

Both my parents worked, but my dad did the cooking. My mom never learned. (Her family had a cook.) She went from college into the Navy into marriage. My dad taught my sisters. He tried to teach me, but I really hated it and it didn't take. My brothers objected to my cooking so my younger sister took over.

[sartorias]

I had a brother who was an excellent, completely self-taught cook--he started really young. I remember him making green pancakes when we were in grade school. I was too terified of getting into trouble if I made a mistake, and on my own it was just easier to skip meals or forage (many of the jobs I worked at were food industry so I foraged from unntouched food on plates after I bussed tables) than to try to accrue cooking stuff and learn by trial and error. Too expensive, too! I finally learned when I had a family to cook for.

[armiphlage]

One of my friends in the UK just had his kid go on an unescorted errand too. I suppose it's good to start developing skills now, rather than toss them out into the wild when they hit adulthood.

[calimac]

What most disturbs me is stories of kids not being tossed out into the wild, but continuing to depend on their parents for simple things even when away at university. I suppose they probably move back home afterwards.

[andrewducker]

You have the same friend :-)

And yes, totally. My job as a parent is to make sure that my kids learn everything they need to know to manage life by the time they need to.

[voidampersand]

I'm a big fan of Swallows and Amazons which is all about kids having adventures and learning to do things and be responsible on their own. Having been to Lake Windermere, you can see the island where the kids camped, from the farmhouse where the parents stayed. If something happened, the kids could semaphore the shore, and it would take two minutes for a parent to row across. But the lack of any serious risk didn't make the adventures less thrilling. And you could see the kids learning and becoming more confident.

[calimac]

I was never given those books, and didn't even learn of them until adulthood. The closest I came to children's books like that was The Happy Hollisters.

One classic children's book I didn't read until I was in grad school, but fortunately came to enjoy as much as if I had found it at a tender age, is The Wind in the Willows.