The times, they are a-changin�

I have just read harri3tspy�s most recent entry in which she bemoans the fact that children today do not have the kind of freedom to play unsupervised that we did when we were their age. I agree with her. When I was little, I too ran all over the neighbourhood with my friends on the block, we sat out on lawns in the long summer evenings, totally unsupervised, played pickup baseball games, and only came in to eat and sleep. There were incidents, such as the day I was running under a string of looped elastics (in a game called yogi or yokie or something like that), tripped, and slid on my face, hands and knees on rough concrete pavement and ran home crying, bleeding all over the place. I learned how to ride a bicycle (a conveyance my mother would not allow, as she had never learned how to ride one herself) on my friends� bikes away from the watchful eyes of my concerned parent, and unbeknownst to her. At that time women would go into shops, leaving their babies in carriages unattended on the sidewalk outside. This wasn�t a small town I grew up in where everyone knew each other, but in a large city. It was a different time.

When my kids were little, I was always where they were, which meant that they didn�t do much. Because I wouldn�t get bundled up to go outside with them, it meant they didn�t get fresh air. There were many activities of which they were deprived because I didn�t have the time or desire to supervise. We spent a lot of time indoors, reading books and playing with toys, but of the running around types of activities, these were not plentiful. I remember being aghast that a neighbour at the bottom of the street would allow her 6-year-old daughter to ride her tricycle all over the neighbourhood (which consisted of our street and hers) totally without knowing at times where she was. I once received a telephone call after dark asking if Vanessa was there, and finding out that her mother had no idea where her daughter was. Luckily there weren�t that many possibilities and the little girl was eventually found at another neighbour�s, but I�m sure her mother experienced a few panicked moments.

I would not let my children play in the stream that runs by our house, supervised or otherwise. It was simply taboo. Whereas my other neighbour had no qualms about her son splashing around in it or crossing to the other side on a plank which her husband had installed for that purpose. The one time my daughter disobeyed me and followed Paul into the stream, her brother (at age 3 or thereabouts) followed too, and ended up with a sharp piece of wood going through the sole of his rubber boot into his foot. It was my daughter I was angry with, because she had broken the rules.

I have often thought that we were overly protective parents when compared to some others we knew. But I watched my kids wait for the school bus from the window, instead of accompanying them everyday to the corner like another of my neighbours. I had my share of freakouts, though, like the time Buddy Boy didn�t get off the school bus when it stopped at the corner at the end of the day.

On the other hand, perhaps continual supervision is not a bad thing. Neither of my children ever fell down a well shaft at age two because they were running around in the back 40, neither was run over by a Hydro truck as the driver backed out of the driveway, and neither was buried in a snow pile because the plow came by clearing the streets and heaping up the snow on the front yards as it passed. My children are alive and healthy and have hopefully learned how to avoid danger.

On the other hand, did they miss something because they were so well protected? I remember at a very young age on Jewish holidays when my parents were working but I wasn�t in school hanging out with my brother and his friends, building tree forts, flying kites, climbing fences into restricted areas, hanging out in vacant lots. Could my brother, a mere three years older than myself, have known what to do in an emergency? I think not. And yet there was no day care, no organized play, no supervision.

It�s a hard one to call.

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