Not OP but I read it as prohibition of the autonomy (of children by today's culture) that they used to have. I can relate, as a child I was expected to be self-sufficient in a way that would be unrecognisable to modern children.
Rather than being ferried by car to the school, and taxied to a series of child appointments, I walked to school alone or with friends. That including crossing a 4 lane highway, at the lights, in a major city. I must have been doing that at age 5 and 6 as at 7 we went to a different school. I don't remember my parents ever taking me apart from the very first time. Maybe a couple more times at most then. Same for everyone else - we all walked. Now every school is near unreachable thanks to the hundreds of cars from parents who are usually near enough to walk.
When playing out I was often told not to come back until dinner, so we'd go off and do stuff.
Every adult around, and everyone else's parent would give us a telling off if we were being out of line. A shopkeeper or stranger might come out to yell. Everyone seemed to have half an eye out for all the kids.
The individualism of today's adults all around has led to them ignoring, or putting up with the excesses of, everyone else's kids. Few would dare say anything, and would probably get a torrent of abuse from the parent if they did.
The over-hype of abuse and stranger danger hasn't helped either - serious things, but not exactly as common as the media imply. Adult males have double the reason not to speak to or tell off someone's child.
I grew up with much the same freedom: in small town Iowa, the school bus was for kids 20 miles away. My street would join the larger neighborhood's kids for the 5 mile walk to and from everyday, rain, thunderstorms, winter snow storm or not. If snow was really bad, dads with snowmobiles would ferry the kids, pulling trains of sleds. Rain was okay, no matter how hard.
After school, the "bike gangs" of kids would be roaming free, stop in for dinner, and then back out till dark. Everyone had this freedom.
As the kids became teens, this being the late 70's, a tax law created incentive for publishing and insurance corporations to move to Iowa. Their families brought major city / coastal teen attitudes, including appetites for a drug culture that Iowa was not sophisticated enough to manage. That Iowa Innocence seems to have been lost. Now it is just another generica in the US corporate sameland, with the original Iowa Natives unable to understand what happened to their culture.
> Now it is just another generica in the US corporate sameland, with the original Iowa Natives unable to understand what happened to their culture.
Is this a very cleverly disguised allegory for the loss of indigenous culture by invading hordes, descended from Europeans who settled the coast of what is now the United States? Do you actually consider small town mid-20th century midwestern US culture to be the culture of the "original Iowa Natives"?
I am referring to the fact that all the States had unique cultures, transplants from their original countries, many idealist moved to the middle states and tried to create utopias in the New World. None of that worked, but there was unique culture, distinct in different parts of many states. Many of these people never move, so they are the original descendants from some religious idealism that fizzled.
I course I recognize these are not the original Iowa Natives. I am referring to the ideal of small towns and their community culture. Which was very real not that long ago.
When playing out I was often told not to come back until dinner, so we'd go off and do stuff.
When I try that with my daughter there is a 97% chance she'll end up at a friends house playing Minecraft or something similar (or she'll just end up in her room playing computer games). Personally I don't think the problem is so much that we don't let kids out, rather that there are so many other, screen based, things competing for kids attention. We don't have to ban kids from playing in the streets since we couldn't convince to do something that boring if we tried.
This isn't new though. It might just be that she's an introvert. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I had the freedom to go pretty much where I pleased, and where I pleased was in my room with a book, or copying programs out of books for my TRS-80, or playing with my GameBoy. That's pretty equivalent, I think. As I got older and had even more freedom with a bike, I usually wound up at a friend's house playing D&D.
Rather than being ferried by car to the school, and taxied to a series of child appointments, I walked to school alone or with friends. That including crossing a 4 lane highway, at the lights, in a major city. I must have been doing that at age 5 and 6 as at 7 we went to a different school. I don't remember my parents ever taking me apart from the very first time. Maybe a couple more times at most then. Same for everyone else - we all walked. Now every school is near unreachable thanks to the hundreds of cars from parents who are usually near enough to walk.
When playing out I was often told not to come back until dinner, so we'd go off and do stuff.
Every adult around, and everyone else's parent would give us a telling off if we were being out of line. A shopkeeper or stranger might come out to yell. Everyone seemed to have half an eye out for all the kids.
The individualism of today's adults all around has led to them ignoring, or putting up with the excesses of, everyone else's kids. Few would dare say anything, and would probably get a torrent of abuse from the parent if they did.
The over-hype of abuse and stranger danger hasn't helped either - serious things, but not exactly as common as the media imply. Adult males have double the reason not to speak to or tell off someone's child.