Things parents do today that you would not have seen 30 yrs ago. I see parents parked in cars and waiting with their kids in it at the end of th driveway for the bus.
There is an elementary school down the street from my house. Damn parents line the streets waiting one by one for the kiddies and block the street if there is oncoming traffic. I had to walk or ride my bike.
I find ride the bus til high school. It was too far away to walk and the streets I would have had to take had too much traffic to ride a bike on.
nowadays, parents are scared shitless by all the media horror stories, different than when I was a little kid in the summer,.. "It's 8 am, where ya goin? ... to Roy's... "whatcha gonna do?" ... I dunno ... "you're taking your .22 with ya?" ... yeah ... "be home before it gets dark".
There are phone apps, I was told, that enable parents to receive all texts their kids receive. Goes too far imo. You have to show kids you trust them, to some extent. Otherwise, you create other problems i.e. rebellion. There's a fine line between the two. I've gone too far each way, at different time. Luckily my kids werr always great kids- way better than I was.
I had to walk 20 miles each way....uphill usually in a snowstorm Really I either walked or rode my bike from the 4th grade on. BTW even in the ‘50s and ‘60s we were warned not to speak with strangers or get in a stranger’s car. It’s a balancing act between protecting your kids and allowing them to learn how to stand on their own two feet.
Great topic and timely. My kid's high school sucks at football, is occasionally good at basketball, and rarely good at baseball. What they are good at is running. It is a track and x-country school. The boy's T&F team has an outstanding coach who does a lot of leadership development with team captains and who really believes in helping to build young men out of track success. He has 4 kids of his own and this weekend, one of his elementary-age sons was in a jog-a-thon and he posted the following comment... "At an elementary school jog-a-thon. Many parents telling their kids to "slow down" and announcer reminding runners "don't go too hard" WHAT IS HAPPENING!" Helicoptering is aimed at preventing kids from failing or hard work, thereby avoiding emotional pain. It is a horrible handicap to lay on a kid. Failure and the ability to maneuver through it all is precisely what makes kids in to healthy, capable, and confident people. If they get out on their own, the first time they suffer a break up, a bad grade, lose a job or promotion, they become unglued because they don't know how to deal with it. It's hard as hell as a parent to watch your kid fail and then see them hurt but it would be a lot harder to see them become an adult incapable of moving through loss or challenge.
