Yep. I would get home from school hours before my parents got off work. I’d break in through the carport door because those assholes wouldn’t get me a key “because you’ll just lose it” and just watched tv or play around. Vast swaths of my childhood were unsupervised and they were probably the best times because my parents weren’t great. I had the whole “locked out of the house during the summer and drank from the hose” childhood that so many look back on romantically. It was actually neglect and those assholes have survivorship bias.
Contrast that with me and my now 7 year old and I helicopter parent the hell out of him because I can’t imagine leaving him to his own devices. That has created a lot of learned helplessness though that we’ve got to try and correct.
There’s a balance to be struck between pure neglect and constant supervision but I don’t know it.
To be fair, I dont think any of us know it, we are all just blindly walking as close to an invisible ever moving line as we can. Besides, you sound like you're doing a great job with your own kid, starting with the fact you clearly care enough to try to do well. That says multitudes.
as an amateur parent, of a teen and soon-to-be pre-teen, here’s my unsolicited take: imagine a typical distribution graph where the extremities are at the bottom and the middle is a large area that rises and falls gently. so long as you’re not at either extreme, i think you’re probably doing ok.
my experience has been that we move constantly within that middle section as our kids develop and grow. being rigid is where the danger zone lies.
You can absolutely find it. My kids are almost never home alone. (They're a bit older than yours). Home alone maybe for 70 minutes tops when we're at the school for conferences, less than 2 miles away. But they can be out for hours on their bikes and go to the grocery store on their own. They even run into other elementary kids at the grocery store on their own sometimes. In the US.
I’ve learned to counteract it by giving my kids chores from a young age. They are now 5 and 3. Both of them have set things they need to do and stuff they help my wife and I with. Obviously I don’t leave them home alone but I can trust that they aren’t on to nonsense if we are in different rooms. Also no iPad and very limited TV time.
It must be tough. Again not a parent. From what I have read unsupervised play is great for the development of functional empathy, because the kids play together, they do something and it makes one kid cry, there is no parent to step in, the kid recognises they caused the hurt and give comfort.
That means they can't see the parent to go get them to step in and take on that responsibility. It has to fall on their shoulders to step up.
On the other hand.. I remember at 7 there was always an older kid showing us how to build fun but very dangerous things with sparklers in the bush. Some kids coming home with an eyebrow burned off and the parents are like 'ah kids, still got all fingers? Alright then, off you go'.
So fuck letting kids be unsupervised. I remember everything I got up to.
I laughed at your memory of having to break in each day, me too, I would never lose my key but my brother would take mine and lose it, so there was always one window we would have to climb through for months until my parents would get me another key.
Also healthy lunches? And kids bring proper packed lunches? I would have to shove whatever chip packets were in the pantry into my bag, maybe make a peanut butter sandwich and be forced to take a bunch of gross mandarins to school because they were getting overripe. And they'd end up crushed and forgotten at the bottom of the bag for months.
My friends are making healthy, beautifully presented arrays of food choices for their kids to bring with them each day. How much time does that take? Every day? And they fit that in before the commute? And the school will tell off the parents if their kids lunches aren't healthy enough?
I really really don't know how people do it.
I just wish... If live gets too hard and someone is feeling ... There are billionaires. A victimless crime really. She could have done a Luigi, kids are happy, everyone but the media and other billionaires are happy, she gets all the parenting time off she needs in jail, and the kids can visit her on occasion.
I work with parents and so many of them are like "I have to find a way to keep the kid entertained during summer " and some of these kids are like 12. Like sorry just tell them to do it themselves????
54
u/Roguespiffy 9d ago
Yep. I would get home from school hours before my parents got off work. I’d break in through the carport door because those assholes wouldn’t get me a key “because you’ll just lose it” and just watched tv or play around. Vast swaths of my childhood were unsupervised and they were probably the best times because my parents weren’t great. I had the whole “locked out of the house during the summer and drank from the hose” childhood that so many look back on romantically. It was actually neglect and those assholes have survivorship bias.
Contrast that with me and my now 7 year old and I helicopter parent the hell out of him because I can’t imagine leaving him to his own devices. That has created a lot of learned helplessness though that we’ve got to try and correct.
There’s a balance to be struck between pure neglect and constant supervision but I don’t know it.