@RedPowerLady – Here’s the problem I have with your “opinion”. You are talking in absolutes about what a child can learn or develop in 9 years, and you are just wrong. Yes, a 9 year old does NOT have the same cognitive and reasoning abilities as a full grown adult, but 9 year olds are also not stupid or incapable. And each child is different, and each develops different skills at different times. My child is often asking me for the freedom to do things I know he isn’t ready for. But some times he’ll ask to do something and I’ll realize that I can’t just assume he is incapable. Parenting is a constant process, and you HAVE to balance your desire to keep them safe from every possible thing that could happen with their need to grow and start doing some things by themselves. You must know your child’s limitations, but you must also be on the lookout for his new abilities at all times.
You should not have to feel that a child must develop all the same reasoning capabilities that an adult has before you let him ANY independence. THAT is an extreme position, and it’s one that in my opinion will do more harm than good in the long run. A child who is never trusted to do slightly more mature things for himself will end up feeling incapable of fending for himself when it comes time to face the real world. I can tell you that firsthand. But like I said, it depends on the child…there are thins that my child is ready for that other kids his age aren’t, just like I know kids his age who are ready for things HE isn’t. It boils down to what the mother herself said, “I did it because I know my son the way you know your kids. I knew he was ready, so I let him go.” Sure, my kid wants to use the toaster, my knee jerk reaction is “he could get burned, I’d better help.” But hey, I let him do it, and now he has a new skill.
The point is, there is no rulebook that says at age x, they can be trusted to do this, at age y they can be trusted to do that. And if it was as cut and dried as “9 is too young” there WOULD be such a book. But there’s something called aptitude and a good parent will know what their kids’ aptitudes are. So, I question this part of your assertion:
“Every 9 year old has limited cognitive capacity and inability to reason effectively
And Delay of Gratification is only 1/2 that of an adult by age 9.
These are scientific facts, as we know them today.”
By “limited” you’re in some pretty gray area. THIS is where I think you’re selling 9 year olds short. Yes there are shades of gray a 9 year old can not see, but it doesn’t mean you can’t trust them to think for themselves ever. Just because a kid can’t fully understand all the nuances of human interactions, though it may technically be defined as “limited cognitive capacity”, it’s a mistake to think they’re helpless or incapable of navigating around risk. And as for inability to reason effectively, again, that’s a bit alarmist….kids can certainly reason effectively, some more so than others….no they can’t use reason as well as adults, but that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of using reason effectively. As for ability to defer gratification, that’s also a generality…I know PLENTY of adults who just plain don’t have that skill, and I know some kids who show exceptional self discipline for their age. All depends on the kid…you’re talking in broad generalities about average capabilities, and I’m talking about child to child variations which make it reasonable for one parent to allow leverage to their kid that another parent would not be able to grant. Saying what is known to be the standard for kids at a particular age does not acknowledge the variables in aptitude from child to child.
In each case, you have to look at what skills and abilities the kid is going to need. For a kid to get home from a well lit department store to his home using a well traveled mass transit system, the kid would need to be able to do the following. 1) Does he know how read a transit map and use it to navigate. Well, if the kid is familiar with the subway system, has traveled it with his parents his whole life, and is observant and can demonstrated correctly to his parents that if he wanted to get from point A to point B, this is how he’d do it, then hey, he has this skill. 2) Does he know how to use a payphone to call home…easy enough to assess. 3) Does he know how to find an authority figure to help him if he gets lost or runs into trouble? 4) With that $20 she gave him for emergencies…ask him, what he considers to be an emergency and what he would do about it…if he covers the main concerns and gets those answers right, well, he’s shown the ability to reason. If you’ve taught him about stranger danger, he’s just as safe on a subway train as he is in your house.
I’m saying, for ANYTHING your kid asks to do if you’re not sure he’s ready to do it, you have to think about it and think through all the things that could realistically go wrong, even some of the remote ones. And you have to find ways to have your child demonstrate that he would handle each of these occurrences in a way that would keep him safe. And if he could do that, age is just a number at that point. Anyway, the ONLY thing that is important here is not your opinion or mine, it is that this woman KNOWS her kid, the way I know mine or if you have any, the way I’m sure you know yours. And I think she summed it up brilliantly in these 4 paragraphs:
“I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). But mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day. The idea that we should provide it and actually could provide it. It’s as if we don’t believe in fate anymore, or good luck or bad luck. No, it’s all up to us.
Childhood really has changed since today’s parents were kids, and not just in the United States. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing videogames. After I started a blog called Free Range Kids, I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his 11-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless.
What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.
If parents all around us are clutching their children close, it’s easy to understand why: It’s what pop culture is telling us to do. Stories of kidnappings swamp the news. Go online, and you can find a map of local sex offenders as easily as the local Victoria’s Secret (possibly in the same place). Meantime, if you do summon the courage to put your kids on a bus or a bench or a bike, other parents keep butting in: An unwatched child is a tragedy waiting to happen.”
There are some things we SHOULD be afraid of, and there are others that we are afraid of because even though they almost never happen, that’s all the media tells us about. I live in a city where there are 2 million people…it’s not New York, but it’s definitely not the small town I grew up in. And maybe once or twice a week I’ll see the top story on the news about someone who was violently assaulted in some way or even killed. And I could look at that and lament how unsafe it is to live here and be afraid to take my son out of the house, or I could realize that less than 100 people out of 2 million are killed every year here, and at least 97 of them were killed by people they know, and most of those involved situations that people if they had two brain cells to rub together would never have put themselves in those situations which ultimately led to their deaths. You deal drugs you might get shot, but maybe once every couple years you hear about someone just minding their business dying for no apparent reason.
Yes, there are child molesters out there, but they’re not around every corner and again, most have assaulted people they knew. The world is just really not all that dangerous a place for those of us who keep our noses clean, and that includes kids. And what I’m saying is, you need to keep your kids safe from risks and danger and threats. But when those risks, dangers and threats are not even all that realistic in the first place, what are you protecting them FROM? And are the long term costs of coddling your child perhaps doing more harm than good? A child simply doesn’t need to have every ability an adult has to navigate risks that are simply not realistic. If the child has the skills necessary to accomplish the task at hand, he should be allowed to try to accomplish THAT task…doesn’t mean you’re going to say he’s ready to get his own apartment, but THIS kid had the skills necessary to navigate the NYC transit system, so why not let him?
Finally, I implore you to look at it this way. In New York, getting around by mass transit is a valuable skill that every person should have. It is wholly plausible that at some point in his childhood, he COULD get separated from his parents in a crowded public place…arguably, that fate is FAR more likely to befall him than is coming to harm at the hands of a stranger. And if that were to happen, he would be far better prepared to deal with it than the kid whose parents didn’t let him test his mettle in this way. Bottom line is, not every kid COULD do that, but despite the fact that they don’t have all the same skills as an adult, as long as they have the skills necessary to deal with the realistic dangers involved in any undertaking, there’s no reason to hold them back if they know they’re ready and YOU know they’re ready. And to judge someone for making that decision for their kid is 100% misguided.
My whole point with you in the first place is that you’ve stated concerns that our out of step with reality…I believe you have been scared by the media into believing the world is much less safe than it actually is. We have simply as a society allowed ourselves to be scared to the point that we no longer allow ourselves to trust our own instincts as to when to give kids more responsibility, and as such we raise them to be scared of things that they should not be scared of, rather than teaching them how to deal with those fears and manage life’s potential pitfalls. In short. I believe the mindset that says “x age is too young for y, period, end of discussion,” is a mindset that sets a child up for failure in the long run. But like you said, we don’t have to disagree, just want you to know that whether you agree with a person’s parenting decisions or not, unless you can demonstrate that the parent is actually putting the child in the way of real harm (as opposed to perceived potential harm that is not in step with the realities of life), that parent has done NOTHING WRONG…yes they did something differently than you would have, but for you to show that she did something wrong would require you to produce some sort of evidence that what she did was in some way dangerous to the child, and what I’m saying is you can’t demonstrate that, because what she did is NOT dangerous in any quantifiable way.
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