A neighbor called the cops on CJ from Light and Momentary for neglectfully letting her six-year-old walk 400 yards home.
At first the cop told me not to overestimate the safety of the neighborhood, saying that there'd been some recent issues with property damage and petty theft. I said, "Property crime is in a completely different league from kidnapping." He said, "Yeah, that's a good point." I said, "If the school district thinks this is a reasonable walk for a 6-year-old child [and they do — there's no bus service for kids in our neighborhood], I'm inclined to agree." He said, "Yeah, that's true." He said he'd have to file a report, but there should be no further action. (I had a friend in the next town over who had the same thing happen last year with her 6yo, and had to be interviewed by CPS as a result.)
Don't we all have to worry about stuff like this, these days?
I live in an inner-city neighborhood which is, while far from the worst part of town, certainly not as safe and homey as CJ's description of her own. The school buses rocket (illegally) down my residential street at 45+ miles per hour. The neighbors are pleasant and many of us recognize each other and wave, but pre-teen children are for the most part confined to their own yards. We have occasional bursts of gang activity, break-ins, and the like (mostly after dark; I'm not afraid to walk down my street in broad daylight). There aren't many walking-to destinations: a corner convenience store, across the busy major-artery street, where I sometimes go to get an onion or a carton of milk; the pleasant, busy neighborhood branch library; a city elementary school playground; a Catholic church, a bit too far to walk with the kids; a couple of ribs'n'wings and taco restaurants, which I'm sad to say we never actually walk to. I dream of the day someone will open a coffee shop in my neighborhood.
We like living in the city and have no plans to leave. But — thinking back to my own childhood in an urban-layout suburb — I remember being allowed, not to cross the busy artery street alone, but to roam all over the block where I lived. I played in the alleys and walked to friends' houses and back, I rode my bike around the block, I built "forts" in the little scrap of woods that bordered my street, all unsupervised, for hours at a time. The trend now is for grownups to super-control young children's lives, and something about it seems very wrong. Surely at some point, my son — he'll be eight next week — will be mature enough to walk three blocks to the library by himself. Surely at some point I could send him to the corner store to buy a pound of butter. It grieves me that I'm more worried about what the neighbors would think — because what if they do call the police? That's a pretty big deal — than about any physical harm befalling him between here and there.
Everybody reasonable seems to agree that today's parental fears are far overblown and today's kids are far overprotected. But that doesn't help us break the cycle of overprotection — because if we're much less overprotective than the parents around us, we worry they'll call the cops on us.
bearing blog 